UW's team has placed eighth in the William Lowell
Putnam Mathematical Competition, an annual contest of
student teams from hundreds of North American universities.
     The 54th annual Putnam test was given on December 4. a
total of 2,356 students from 402 colleges and universities
in Canada and the United States took part, and 291 of those
institutions entered teams.
     This year the top five teams were from Duke
University, Harvard University, Miami University (Ohio),
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
University of Michigan.
     Other top-10 teams, listed in alphabetical order by
Putnam officials from the American Mathematical
Association, were from Cornell, New York University,
Princeton, and the University of Toronto.
     Last year, a UW team placed third in the Putnam
contest.
     Members of the UW Putnam team this year were Daniel
Brown, a fourth-year math student, and third-year students
Ian Goldberg and Peter Milley.
     Ka-Ping Yee, a first-year computer engineering
student, had the top score among Waterloo participants,
ranking 22nd, but was not listed as a team member.
     Goldberg and Yee were also members of the programming
team that won a world championship from the Association for
Computing Machinery a few days before the Putnam results
were announced.
     Honourable mention in the Putnam went to Goldberg, who
ranked 29th,  and Jie Lou, who ranked 37th.
     Also ranking in the top 125 were Brown, Milley and Eli
Lapell. Again the showing among all the Waterloo students
who wrote the competition was very strong: 10 placed in the
top 207 (representing one-third of all the participants in
that group from Canadian universities), and 23 placed in
the top 415.
     Coaches again this year were Dr. Chris Small and Dr.
Mary Thompson, both of the department of statistics and
actuarial science.
     Canadians in general fared very well in the
competition. Twenty-nine students from Canadian
universities ranked among the top 207, and 74 in the top
415 - a percentage much higher than one would expect, given
the population of Canada relative to that of the United
States.
     Many of these Canadian students had participated while
they were in secondary school in the summer seminars for
top finishers in the Canadian Mathematics Competition,
based in UW's faculty of mathematics, says Shirley Thomson
of the dean of math office.