U.T. Putnam preparations, 2019

First read more about the Putnam competition on this page's parent page

This year's UT Putnam competition will take place at 9am on Dec 7, 2019. in RLM 9.166.

UT Students who want to prepare for the Putnam competition -- and even those who just want to learn some mathematics or have fun trying hard problems! -- are invited to join us for weekly practices during the Fall term. We meet THURSDAY evenings at 5:00 in RLM 9.166, (starting Sept 26) working on problems for an hour or so until we stop for free pizza; then we stick around for another hour or so discussing our solutions and talking about related bits of mathematics and strategies for attacking these kinds of problems.

Students are encouraged to write up their solutions, too. You can bring your solutions to me so we can discuss how to improve your presentation, or you can send them to me to be posted here for the benefit of other students -- and to encourage others to give you feedback!

I will post the problems we work on each week right here. I can also post solutions to the problems but what I would prefer to do is to have some of YOU submit write-ups to solutions that you have worked out! Get them to me and I will post them.

Here are the problem sets we've worked on so far.

1. At our first meeting we worked on last year's Bennet Competition problems. These are calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations problems; most of them are quite tricky! Some solutions were presented by students at our prep session; if you want to see my solutions and commentary you can head over to the Bennett Competition page and look at the answer keys for the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 exams.
2. Week 2 (Oct 3) is for Number Theory (by popular demand!) I have not written up solutions; perhaps you would like to provide some? (I did type up a few answers
3. Week 3 (Oct 10) --- you requested fancy Calculus question; here you go! (Some are actual Putnam problems!) Ethan Jana has provided answers to some of the questions (numbers 2,3, and 6)
4. Week 4 (Oct 17) --- all kinds of Geometry!. I had time to write up a few of the answers
5. Week 5 (Oct 24) was an introduction to Abstract Algebrai, but I will also have a few randomly-chosen problems from other subjects, for those who have no idea what "Abstract Algebra" even means! I haven't written up solutions except for Problem 3, which seemed to annoy many of the students. Liam Nickell also sent in a solution; his is more symmetrical!
6. Week 6 (Oct 31) was for Combinatorics. I got some solutions from William Blount (#4) and Luis Kim (#1, #5) which seem to check out. (I had already written up my own solution to problem 1, together of what I remembered of Luis's, here.)
7. Week 7 (Nov 7) we did Linear Algebra. I jotted down the ideas behind the solutions of a few of them.
8. Week 8 (Nov 14) we did Functional Equations and Inequalities There were some typos; I think this version fixes them. Again I sketched a few solutions
9. Week 9 (Nov 21) was just playing games! Well, not really playing them but analyzing them. I think we had solutions to most of them. Here's a solutioni to just one.
10. Nov 28 is Thanksgiving --- there will be no meeting.
11. Week 10 (Dec 5) is just two days before the Putnam Exam itself. We will try solving an actual Putnam exam from years gone by.

For more information about the competition please contact Dave Rusin in RLM 9.140. (rusin@math.utexas.edu)