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 Feb. 20, 2021. Because of the pandemic, students will take the exam remotely; because students are remote, the contestants will be unproctored, and because they are unproctored there will be no official winners nor rankings, and no prizes will be awarded. That is, the contest will be an unofficial, "friendly" competition this year.
TL;DR : you should plan to participate in the Putnam just for fun this year.
You may register yourself for the competition; head to aops.com/contests/putnam/student We will also have an organizational meeting via Zoom, on Wednesday Feb. 17 at 3:30pm (Austin time). You may attend the meeting without committing to participate in the competition, or register for the competition without attending the meeting. You should also feel free to come to any part of the meeting, for example if you have an overlapping class. I will be happy to answer any questions, and to share some information about the exam format (as I understand it to be this year!). The link for the Zoom meeting is https://utexas.zoom.us/j/9899620457
Prep sessions for the 2020-2021 competition have concluded, but the following shows some of the topics we covered --- feel free to try some of these problems before the Putnam!
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 will meet Wednesday afternoons 3:30-5:00 starting September 30 and continuing until Thanksgiving. The meetings will be held via Zoom; here is the text of the Zoom invitation and here is a direct link
You may participate in the Prep Sessions without obligating yourself to sit for the Exam; or you may take the exam without joining any of the prep sessions. Feel free to come and go as you please during the prep sessions. (Just be polite about it!)
This is a new format for us (like everything else in 2020!) so it is not entirely clear how we will proceed. Probably what we will do each week is to have a short introduction to one math topic that shows up on Putnam exams, and then spend say 45 minutes working on a handful of Putnam or Putnam-like problems centered on that topic. Students can work alone or in Zoom breakout rooms as they wish. We will then take the remaining time to share our ideas and our answers.
If you have the ability to put together a "document camera" or have a tablet machine with a useful stylus or something, then you could show everyone how you solved a problem. It's not necessary to have these things but I do want to encourage everyone to present solutions: that's very good practice for writing up solutions that can get points from the Putnam graders!
Similarly, students are encouraged to write up their solutions after our prep session, too. You can send your solutions to me so we can discuss how to improve your presentation, or 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.
For more information about the competition please contact Dave Rusin in PMA 9.140. (rusin@math.utexas.edu)
