Official website

From the Official website, the Putnam competition this year will be on Saturday, December 1st, 2012.
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 1st.

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, as it will be very helpful for your preparation.

To register, please print and fill out the form, and submit it by NOON September 20th.

Schedule (for training sessions)

The time will be 4:00 -- 5:00pm. The room is N1058, Science Building. The following table gives the rough outline of the sessions.

Sessions:

The following is a tentative (meaning the order or content of the sessions might change) list of sessions. The topics will roughly follow the book "Putnam and Beyond" (it can be downloaded in its entirety here). 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	Topics
Sept. 24th	Dr. E. Wang	Introduction, problems from past competitions, sequences and series
Oct. 1st	Dr. K. Zhao	Algebra: Identities and Inequalities, Polynomials
Oct. 8th		Thanksgiving, no session
Oct. 15th	Dr. C. Sloss	Combinatorics and Probability: Combinatorial arguments, Binomial coefficients and Counting methods, Probability
Oct. 22nd	Dr. L. Howe	Number theory: Integer-valued sequences and functions, Arithmetic
Oct. 29th	Dr. E. Wang	Number theory: Diophantine equations
Nov. 5th	Dr. M. Santoprete	Real analysis: Continuity, Derivatives and Integrals
Nov. 12th	Dr. A. Metzler	Real analysis: Multivariable differential and integral calculus, Equations with functions as unknowns
Nov. 19th	Dr. P. Zhang	Geometry and trignometry
Nov. 26th	Dr. E. Wang	Topics on combinatorics
Dec. 1st (Sa)	Dr. S. Hu	COMPETITION !! At room BA403

Results

Three students took part in both sessions of the competition on December 1st, 2012. The results will be available late March.

If you email me I can send you a copy of the problems. There are 6 problems for each 3 hour session, come to a total of 12 problems.

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 problems from Math-Olympiad.com (Up to 64th, with solutions)

Putnam at other places (and other times):

Cornell
Stony Brooks (06)
University of Tennessee Knoxville
MIT

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Shengda Hu
shu@wlu.ca
28 August 2012

Last edited/updated: November 22nd, 2012