Official website

From the Official website, the Putnam competition this year will be on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011.
There will be two sessions. The first is 9:00 am -- 12:00 noon and the second is 2:00 pm -- 5:00 pm.

Coordinator

Dr. Shengda Hu

Office: BA547
Email: shu@wlu.ca
Phone: 519-8840710x2223

Registration

For the competition:

You need to email me by NOON October 7th, as mentioned in the announcement email. .... Finished.

For the training sessions:

You don't have to register to attend the training sessions. On the other hand, if you do prepare to participate in the Putnam Competition, then you should register so that we can try to accommodate your schedule.

To register, please print and fill out the form, and submit it by NOON October 10th. .... Finished

Schedule

The time will be 4:00 -- 5:00pm. The first session will be on the Tuesday, Oct. 11th in Room BA535. Starting from the second session, it will be on the Monday of the week in Room BA110. As shown in the following table.

Sessions:

The following is a tentative list of sessions. The topics will roughly follow the book "Putnam and Beyond" (it can be downloaded in its entirety). Depending on the time available, not all topics will be covered.

To get the most out of these sessions, it is important to prepare for the topics that will be covered before coming to them, and work as many problems as possible afterwards. Reading the examples and trying some of the problems would be a good way to prepare. You need to understand your weakness in order to get stronger.

Date	Instructor (Room)	Topics
Oct. 11 (T)	Dr. E. Wang (BA535)	Introduction, problems from past competitions, sequences and series
Oct. 17 (M)	Dr. R. Makarov (BA110)	Algebra: Identities and Inequalities, Polynomials
Oct. 24 (M)	Dr. E. Wang (BA110)	Combinatorial argument
Oct. 31 (M)	Dr. G. Lai (BA110)	Real analysis: Continuity, Derivatives and Integrals
Nov. 7 (M)	Dr. Y. Chen (BA110)	Real analysis: Multivariable differential and integral calculus, Equations with functions as unknowns
Nov. 14 (M)	Dr. C. Stoica (BA110)	Geometry and trignometry
Nov. 21 (M)	Dr. E. Wang (BA110)	Number theory: Integer-valued sequences and functions, Arithmetic, Diophantine equations
Nov. 28 (M)	Dr. D. Woolford (BA110)	Combinatorics and Probability: Combinatorial arguments, Binomial coefficients and Counting methods, Probability
Dec. 3 (Sa)	Dr. S. Hu (BA110)	COMPETITION !!

Results

There were three students taking the actual competition. Hooray for them!! The results will be available late March.

Resources

(Please report broken links)

Problems and books

A very nice book: Putnam and Beyond by Razvan Gelca and Titu Andreescu
MAA AMC Putnam problems page
Web archive image of the well-known Math competition site by John Scholes.

Putnam at other places (and other times):

Cornell
Stony Brooks (06)
University of Tennessee Knoxville
MIT

---

Shengda Hu
shu@wlu.ca
29 September 2011

Last edited/updated: December 20th, 2011