VICTORIA MARTINEZ
News Editor

Have you ever wanted to spend six hours on a Saturday doing a math test where the average score is a couple points out of 120? Well then, the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is for you.

Every year, undergraduates across Canada and the United States are invited to participate in this gruelling exam and, every year, thousands accept the invitation. The exam is done in two three-hour sessions divided by a two hour lunch break. Each session offers six questions, with each question marked out of 10. Since 2008, only three students were awarded perfect scores.

Every school that participates may choose a team of three students to compete for a cumulative score. Generally, 400 to 500 teams enter the competition. The highest recent ranking for the U of S came in 2007, when the team ranked 52nd out of 413 teams.

The prizes are appealing. The top prize is $12,000 and a scholarship to Harvard for graduate studies. Other top students receive prizes from $250 to $2,500, while top teams receive $5,000 to $25,000.

Students can only take the exam four times, and never once they’ve obtained an undergraduate degree.

Derek Perrin, a third-year engineering student at the University of Saskatchewan, was one of the competitors this year. His speciality is physics, which applies creative thinking to math and helped him prepare for creating proofs on the exam.

“You want to prove or verify, and you get stuck making sure your proof is actually valid,” Perrin explained.

Given the prestige and challenge of the exam, Perrin prepared properly. “I do 100 crunches a day, do some chin ups and stuff like that. Read some Kreyszig. I’ll probably take advantage of [math professor] Walid Abou-Salem’s office hours,” he said, only half-joking.

Mathematics professor James Brooke, who coordinates the Saskatoon exam writing, gave a more detailed account of the preparatory process.

“We conduct weekly problem-solving sessions for about one and a half hours each, beginning in mid-October until the exam the first Saturday in December,” he explained. He also said that at the U of S, students take the exam for fun, and “it shouldn’t take away from life and school.”

As an undergraduate exam, the Putnam uses math available to any undergraduate math student, ranging from high-school trigonometry to multivariable calculus.

Brooke describes the problems as “precisely-posed and rather simply-stated,” which is what makes careful mathematical thinking important.

“You might know the answer, but not how to get it,” says Perrin.

The practice sessions use questions from old exams to develop methods to work through problems. “We do a sort of brain-storming approach unless a student thinks he or she has a solution. In that case the student presents to the group for constructive criticism, and sometimes then I get a chance to offer a suggestion,” said Brooke.

Though competitors don’t see results until March, Perrin is confident he’s not one of the 1,000 or so students who score zero on the exam every year.

“It was a hard test. I don’t think anybody thinks they aced it… Out of the four of us geniuses not one of us said, ”˜I feel really confident about that, I think I got a 90.’ ”

Perrin’s just pleased he answered a couple of questions, which each took pages of work. And he’s already excited to do the exam again next year.

– –
image: Pete Yee