Wesleyan Team Places in Top Third during Mathematical Competition

A Wesleyan team scored 130th out of 402 teams at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered by The Mathematical Association of America. In Dec. 2012, 4,277 students from 578 institutions took the exam. Some students competed in groups of three.

Wesleyan’s top scorer was Joshua Neitzel ’14 with a rank of 239. Sangsan Warakkagun ’15 ranked 569, and Eli Halperin ’15 and Jeremy Fehr ’13 ranked 870.5.

The Putnam Exam is given every year on the first Saturday in December. The exam’s first problem was:

“A1 (2012) Let d1, d2, …, d12 be real numbers in the open interval (1,12). Show that there exist distinct indices i, j, k such that di, dj, dk are the side lengths of an acute triangle.”

“Wesleyan students did very well in the contest this year. It is an exam given for fun, with extremely challenging problems,” said Karen Collins, professor of mathematics.

More than 52 percent of all the contestants received a score of 0.