Putnam Competition Results: Princeton Captures Top Prize

The three-member team from Princeton University—Ana Caraiani, Andrei Negut, and Aaron C. Pixton—took the top prize of $25,000 at the 2006 William Lowell Mathematical Competition, which was held last December. In addition, each team member received a prize of $1,000.

The William Lowell Putnam Competition—a challenging mathematics exam for North American undergraduates—is administered by the MAA.

The other top teams were: Harvard University (Tiankai Liu, Alison B. Miller, and Tong Zhang); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Oleg Golberg, Daniel M. Kane, and Kuat T. Yessenov); University of Toronto (Tianyi David Han, János Kramár, and Viktoriya Krakovna); and University of Chicago (David Coley, Junehyuk Jung, and Zhiwei Calvin Lin).

The Putnam Fellows—the top five individual scorers—each received $2,500. They were Hansheng Diao (MIT); Daniel M. Kane (MIT); Tiankai Liu (Harvard); Po-Ru Loh (California Institute of Technology); and Yufei Zhao (MIT).

Harvard's Alison B. Miller was named the winner of the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which is awarded to the woman whose mathematical expertise is considered "particularly meritorious."

A total of 3,640 students from 508 colleges and universities in Canada and the United States participated in the competition. There were teams from 402 institutions.

Problems, solutions, and results from the 2006 exam (and from previous exams) are available online at the American Mathematics Competitions website.

The lists of the top ten teams and the top 100 individual contestants in 2006 will also be published in the American Mathematical Monthly, together with the problems and solutions.