The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition 2002: Results

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition took place on Saturday, December 7, 2002. Here is much of my e-mail announcing the results

This year's competition was ridiculously easy by Putnam standards. The median on this year's Putnam was 3. Not 3 questions, but 3 points out of 120. The fact that a median of 3/120 is considered to be "ridiculously easy" is a good explanation for why the Putnam is sometimes called the "World's hardest test" (as it was in the Dec. 23, 2002 issue of Time Magazine). So congratulations are due to anyone up to the challenge of taking it.

Now for the results:

Stanford placed fifth. This is the fifth time in the history of the Putnam we've made the top five. (The fourth time was last year, and the third time was 1991.) The team consisted of sophomore Chee Hau Tan, junior Paul Valiant, and senior Daniel Wright. They have won $5000 for the department, and $200 each for themselves.

Ahead of us were Harvard, Princeton, Duke, and Berkeley. Ranked 6th through 10th, in alphabetical order (the actual order isn't announced) are Caltech, Harvey Mudd, MIT, Toronto, and Waterloo.

Although I'm very happy with the team results, and the $5000, for many reasons I (and most others) look beyond the team results to see how we did. One reason is that the method of computing team rank is somewhat bizarre, and subject to variability. (Teams are ranked by the sum of the individual ranks, which means one person having a bad day can be disproportionately harmful to the team rank.)

Instead, people tend to look at: how the very top people did; the number in the top 200; the top 500; and number of those who get "on the board", i.e. who can get points. We stacked up very well in all of these categories as well.