Contact

Phone: 470-578-7235

Email: mlavrov@kennesaw.edu

Office Location: D 245

Office Hours:
Check the course pages for information about office hours for my classes, or send me an email to make an appointment.

The Putnam Competition

About the competition

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is a yearly math contest for undergraduate students around the United States. The competition is always held on the first Saturday of December; this year, it is on Saturday, December 7th. KSU students will be able to participate in person on the Marietta campus.

The Putnam competition is a very intense experience. To help you feel more prepared for it, and/or to help you decide if you want to participate, I will be holding several (much less intense) Putnam practices throughout the fall semester. No prior math competition experience is required. Familiarity with proof-writing (for example, via Math 2390: Introduction to Logic, Sets, and Proofs) is encouraged, but one of my goals with the practice sessions is to give you some extracurricular practice in proof-writing.

As far as being prepared for the Putnam itself, by far the most important prerequisite is becoming comfortable with creative problem-solving: a skill that will serve you well in any field. The problems on the competition cover a variety of mathematical topics, but none of them are routine exercises; to solve them, you will have to explore, try things that don't work, develop insights, and turn those insights into rigorous arguments.

If you might be interested in participating in the competition, or in attending any of the practice sessions, please fill out this Google Form: https://forms.gle/8RvEJsshGU3XbQgD9.

Fall 2024 schedule

Unless stated otherwise, all of the events below will be in room J 217 in the Atrium building. (It looks like this room is reserved on the day of the competition, so the actual competition will be held in a classroom in the Johnson library.)

After each practice, I will post PDFs of my handouts on this webpage.

  • Saturday, September 14, 2024, 1:00pm-2:30pm.
    Our first Putnam practice! We will not focus on any particular topic this week; we'll just look at a variety of problems and discuss how to solve them.
    (Handout)

  • Saturday, September 28, 2024, 1:00pm-2:30pm.
    A Putnam practice on the topic of polynomials.
    (Handout)

  • Wednesday, October 9, 2024, 5:30pm-6:30pm; room D 224 in the Math building.
    I will be talking at the Math Club about how to use some facts from graph theory in problem-solving and on the Putnam competition.
    (Handout)

  • Saturday, October 12, 2024, 1:00pm-2:30pm.
    A Putnam practice on the topic of number theory.
    (Handout)

  • Saturday, October 26, 2024, 1:00pm-2:30pm.
    A Putnam practice on the topic of linear algebra.
    (Handout)

  • Saturday, November 9, 2024, 1:00pm-2:30pm.
    A Putnam practice on the topic of recurrence relations.
    (Handout)

  • Saturday, November 16, 2024, 1:00pm-2:30pm.
    A practice Putnam exam! We'll limit it to 90 minutes rather than 6 hours, but otherwise this practice will be very similar to the Putnam competition; you will work on problems individually, and if you write up solutions, I will let you know how they might be scored in the actual competition.

  • Saturday, December 7, 2024, 9:45am-6:00pm in the Johnson library.
    The actual competition! The first round will take place 10am-1pm. After a lunch break, the second round will take place 3pm-6pm.

Other resources

An archive of past Putnam problems and solutions can be found on https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/.

If you are interested in a less formal and scary way of competing mathematically, check out Math Stingers. These are problems at a variety of skill levels that test some of the same creative problem-solving skills that you need for the Putnam.

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