Newsmakers in the College of Natural Sciences

Math team scores high on prestigious exam

A team of Chico State math students had their best finish ever in the Putnam Math Competition exam, one of the premier math competitions in the world, according to “Chico News.” Chico finished 30th out of 400 universities, placing in the top 10 percent on this test.

The team consisted of three undergraduates, David Stolp, Teresa Jacobson, and Gabriel Maybrun. David ranked in the top 200 among the 3500 students who wrote the exam last December. Teresa was in the top 400 and Gabriel was in the top 600. Five other CSUC students took the exam: Rob Abbot, Alexandra Appel, Hilary Haddorff, Jungyul Kwon, and Sandra Mohammed.

“Our Putnam math team did exceptionally well this year,” said Associate Professor Thomas Mattman. “They placed 30th. That is really an achievement when one considers the list of the top 10 teams: Harvard, Princeton, Duke, MIT, Waterloo, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Toronto, and Yale. The best previous finish of a CSUC Putnam team was 104th in 2003.”

The Putnam Math Competition is offered every December to several thousand students from Canada and the United States. It is an extremely difficult exam. It is not unusual that the median score is 0. In other words, half the students earn no points at all. A perfect score is 120. Only three students have earned a perfect score in the 70 year history of the competition.

Putnam History

The competition began in 1938 and is designed to stimulate a healthful rivalry in mathematical studies in the colleges and universities of the United States and Canada. It exists because Mr. William Lowell Putnam had a profound conviction in the value of organized team competition in regular college studies. Mr. Putnam, a member of the Harvard class of 1882, wrote an article for the December 1921 issue of the Harvard Graduates' Magazine in which he described the merits of an intellectual intercollegiate competition. To establish such a competition, his widow, Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, in 1927 created a trust fund known as the William Lowell Putnam Intercollegiate Memorial Fund. The first competition supported by this fund was in the field of English and a few years later a second experimental competition was held, this time in mathematics between two institutions. It was not until after Mrs. Putnam's death in 1935 that the examination assumed its present form and was placed under the administration of the Mathematical Association of America.