Adding up to a big win
It’s official: MIT students “rock” at math. MIT swept the board at this year’s prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, winning the team award and placing five students among the top six individual spots, an achievement that earns each the title of “Putnam Fellow.” The Putnam competition, the premier undergraduate mathematics contest in the U.S. and Canada, is notoriously tough: The median score for the latest exam, held last Dec. 6, was just three points out of a possible 120; more than half of the participants did not solve a single problem fully. This makes the overall performance of MIT’s students all the more remarkable, according to Michael Sipser, the Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics and dean of the School of Science. “This year’s fantastic and unprecedented performance by MIT’s undergraduate math stars continues our increasingly amazing results over the past decade on the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition,” Sipser says. “Congratulations to...