Who here also /putnam/?
I'm kinda freaking out. I'm a junior and this is my first year taking it, and I didn't prep at all because I was lazy.
I'm looking at practice problems now and I'm hardly coming close at all to a correct answer.
I suppose there's always next year.
I'm taking it.
Why would you freak about about a non-mandatory exam that's taken just for fun and has no bearing on your potential skill as a professional mathematician?
Just relax, dude. If you do poorly, then great - you're like everyone else.
>>7700118
im a freshman who is shit at math
do i have any reason to consider taking this
>>7700124
Honestly? You have no business being there... if placing is your concern.
But it's just for fun, so just show up and see what it's like. It's just an experience. Don't worry about it.
>>7700122
>Why would you freak about about a non-mandatory exam that's taken just for fun and has no bearing on your potential skill as a professional mathematician?
It has a lot of bearing on your chances to get into a prestigious grad school that gives you a nonzero chance to become a professional mathematician.
>>7700256
It has absolutely zero bearing on your chances of getting into a prestigious graduate school.
The Putnam is for fun. If you do well, you win a huge cash prize. Great.
Professional mathematics has nothing to do with being able to do clever problems based on specific tricks like this on the spot. Professional mathematics is about really doing mathematics: research and research problems.
Most professors are no better at solving these problems than undergraduates under the same conditions (granted, a professional mathematician could probably answer any question or finish an exam if given a week).
These contests have nothing to do with doing mathematics.
>>7700264
Pretty much this. Getting good at the Putnam is certainly worthwhile and will teach you some cool tricks, but being able to do those tricks hard and fast doesn't have much to do with mathematics research.
>>7700317
This. The issue is, these problems test ingenuity. Most people do not have enough ingenuity to solve these problems using that alone. So, how do you get good at them? Well, they teach you to the test - they show you problem types, tricks to use, and what to look for and then you basically get good at recognizing that stuff yourself. And if you get good enough at it, you'll be able to exploit the test, essentially, and even if you have a meager intellect you'll be able to do well. Doing good for that reason, I think, is different from doing well on this test because you have the natural, raw talent of someone like Gauss and Euler combined.
The issue is, we don't know of a way yet to increase the ingenuity or creativity part of the test. This is why it has no bearing on real math.
It's also why graduate students aren't allowed and why you can only write this test four times... because by then, you'll have enough KNOWLEDGE to makeup for a potential lack of ingenuity and once you've seen the test four times, you're at a huge advantage over people who have seen it only once, for example.
>>7700118
I'm taking it, I'm going to get rekt.
it's simple shit come on guys
i hope ill finish fast, why they do this quiz during weekend
This is how I'm approaching the Putnam.
Oh look, a Putnam thread! How'd everyone do? Just got out of my second session. I feel very good about the product problem from the morning part, and I'm confident I'm right on the "end in 2015" part, but I don't think I proved it adequately (we all get the same test, right?)
>>7702045
Just finished mine. A3 was piss easy, I thought it was a joke. B2 was kind of weird since you could find the actual number pretty easily.
>>7702096
Yup. I got A3 and B2 as well.
I was THIS close to getting B1.
A1 was also easy - I figured it out after I left the exam (sqrt(AB)) because you could use a nice geometry trick to see the two trapezoids to figure it out.
Other than that, I only wrote down shit for part marks and a couple guesses for stuff.
>>7702143
A3 was the one with the double product.
B2 was the one where you cross off sums of 3 numbers and have to find out if there's something ending in a certain number in there.
Solutions end up on the art of problem solving's page.
I think the invigilator said something about scores being released in March.
A1 was piss-easy if you minimized the area of the region bounded between the hyperbola and the triangle instead of maximizing the area of the triangle.
Finished up nicely with some simple but admittedly brute-forcey calculation.
>>7702192
Also, did anyone get A6? I could only get the case when matrix "M" was non-singular.
>>7702204
I figured as much. I felt so plebian and dirty writing down my solution.
>>7700118
I slept in lol
>>7702205
Don't feel bad. I didn't figure it out until I left. I do feel good about A3, though - the invigilator was a former Putnam writer in his youth. He didn't get A3, but I managed to. I also got similar guesses to his on other problems.
Can't wait until next year.
For A2 what was the prime that divided a_2015? i thought it was 5, but 3 also seemed to work.
I didn't have enough time to finish my induction...
UK here, do you guys get to take the question paper home? Can someone upload a scan?
Genuinely interested in how difficult the questions are.
>>7702663
>there's literally an archive of up-to-last-year exams
>>7702722
But I want this year's one so I can get involved with this thread.
sounds like you guys are putnam in their place lel
