Putnam Practice Sessions.

• Time and Place: Spring Term 2024, Tuesdays 4:30pm, LeConte room 440


• Format: A week before each session problems will be passed out or emailed to participants and also available at this web site. During the review session participants can present their work on problems and discuss the solution or solutions. If no one has a solution then one of the organizers, Jonah Klein or Henry Simmons, will give a hint or a solution.


• Participants: Students interested in taking the Putnam Exam. More generally anyone interested in working on some challenging problems and discussing and presenting mathematics.

Problems.

• Problems for Tuesday, March 19.
• Problems for Tuesday, March 26. For some of these problems the intermediate value theorem or mean value theorem may be useful.
• Problems for Tuesday, April 2 . For some of these problems the following could be useful root test, ratio test, integral test, Euler's formula \(e^{i\theta}= \cos(\theta) + i \sin(\theta)\), and sum of a finite geometric series.
• Problems for Tuesday, April 9 . For some of these problems the following could be useful determinant of a matrix and trace of a matrix.

Some resourses.

• The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is the official page at the Mathematical Association of America.
• The Putnam Archive maintained by Kiran S. Kedlaya. This page has lists of all the exams and solutions going back to 1985. It also has lists of previous Putnam fellows, history of the exam, and other Putnam related topics.
• Putnam Problems has a list of all problems from the first competition in 1938 to 2003.
• Putnam and Beyond 2nd Edition by Răzvan Gelca and Titu Andreescu. This book not only has many problems and solutions arranged by subject and method of proof, it is an introduction to several interesting topics not often covered at the undergraduate level. The previous edition is freely available online here.
• Art of Problem Solving is a good source of problems and how to solve them.