Hi everyone -- The Putnam results recently came in. It was a great year for Stanford. The competition (as you all know well) was a difficult one, and the median score was 1 (out of 120), so basically everyone from Stanford was at least at the median. Congratulations to all of you for undertaking a serious challenge. To hear more precisely how you did, please send me an e-mail. (I may be a little slow in responding, as I'm currently on leave at Berkeley, and not checking my e-mail that often.) To see how other schools did, you can see the Announcement of Winners, soon to be posted on the third floor bulletin board. Some Stanford details: * The team of Kenny Easwaran, Paul Valiant, and David Vickrey placed fifth! (As a result, they will each receive $200, and Stanford receives $5000.) This was a terrific showing; I looked as far back as I easily could (to 1985), and only once in that time period have we done as well (fourth in 1991). Congratulations to them!! Kenny and David are both graduating this year, so best of luck to them in their future endeavours. * David and Paul were both Honorable Mentions, and Kenny was very close to the cut-off. * All participating schools are sent a list of the top roughly 500 students, so that their graduate schools can take the results into account. On that list from Stanford were: Daniel Wright, Chee Hau Tan, Florin Ratiu, Yuanli Zhou, Erik Carlsson, Chin Lum Kwa, Robert McConnell, Miguel Balauag, and Jared Kaplan. Qin Zhuang and Chris Davis were within a couple of points of that. Also doing well: Kevin Luli, Alexander Kendall, Jeff Russell, Katarzyna Bryc, Ying-zong Huang, and Keelia Machmer-Wessels. * We had a particularly strong freshman showing this year, which is likely indicative of an unusually good class. Again, congratulations to all of you for tackling the Putnam, and for doing so well! Ravi Vakil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ravi Vakil Stanford University Office: 383M Dept. of Mathematics, Bldg. 380 vakil@math.stanford.edu Stanford CA USA 94305-2125 http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------