Thank you for your interest in the 2020 Bennett Competitions!

Due to the limitations of this year's pandemic lockdowns, we are
forced to run the competitions a little differently. The questions
are comparable to any other year's contest, but in order to ensure
that everyone is given equal opportunity to do well while working
away from campus, we must insist that participants follow some new
rules. (These are in addition to your affirmation of the University's
Honor Code.)

The competitions will be held Wednesday, December 9 2020. The
exam times are
  3pm-5pm   Calculus Exam
  6pm-8pm   Linear Algebra Exam
The contests are open only to students who will have completed
the relevant courses in 2020.

The entire contest will take place during a Zoom call. Please
sign in to
   https://utexas.zoom.us/j/9899620457
with your UT account prior to the start of the competition. You
should have a camera pointed at your workspace while you complete
the exam. Please enable the "chat" bar and keep your speakers on,
in case it is necessary to alert you to a typo, to announce the
time remaining, etc.

You should also enable a web browser and prepare to download a
copy of the questions. They will appear by the appointed start
time; a URL will be posted to the chat bar. (The questions will
be a single-page PDF file.) You may wish to print the questions
for your convenience but that is not necessary.

You will of course have to solve the problems on your own, without
help from any other person, book, notes, internet resource,
calculator, or computer. Just make sure you have handy plenty of blank
paper and a writing implement or two. You should submit all your
"scratch" work as part of your answer --- no credit will be given for
correct answers that appear "magically" without explanation. (You may,
and probably should, throw away any scratch work that you decide later
was unhelpful or took you down a wrong path.) If you have time, you
may wish to write up your answers in a cleaner, more streamlined way:
the judges are human and likely to be influenced by a clear, complete,
and organized presentation of an answer. But getting your work to us
in some form by the deadline is the higher priority.

These questions are difficult and time-consuming; most participants
do not complete all of them (at least, not well!) While we can't predict
how contestants will do this year, it is certainly true that some
people in the past have won prize money with only a few questions
answered correctly. So do your best and be optimistic!

You will have to convert your answer to a form suitable for email,
and send the email off before the exam period ends. You may wish
to use a scanner for this; there are apps for smart phones that
do this as well. A photograph of each written page is acceptable 
though this is cumbersome. Whatever method you choose to use, 
we encourage you to practice your technique in advance so that you
can comfortably do this in the last few minutes of the competition.

With your submission, please also provide the following information:
   Name
   EID
   Current Calculus/Linear Algebra course and instructor
      (if your eligibility was during Spring 2020 instead, please say so.)
   Permanent Mailing Address
   E-mail address
   College (Natural Sciences, Engineering, etc.)
You should probably write out this information in advance to save a few minutes.

If, during the competition, you have a question or a technical issue with 
your testing environment, please use the Zoom chat bar to contact me; unless
you are confident the question is relevant to the whole class, you should
use the drop-down menu to send a "private" message to me (the host).

Once all the submissions have been received, the judging panel will begin
to review the papers; this will surely be a slower process than in a normal
semester but we hope to be able to identify the winners by the end of final
exam period. Winners will be posted to
    math.utexas.edu/~rusin/Bennett/
as soon as they are known.

We apologize for the cumbersome arrangement necessary this semester, but
still we hope you will enjoy the challenging problems we have selected for
you. There is plenty of interesting and relevant mathematics that can barely 
be mentioned in the typical undergraduate courses; read through the answer keys
after the competition to learn some of these hidden gems!

Thank you in advance for your participation!

Dave Rusin
Bennett Competition Committee
Department of Mathematics
University of Texas