Indianapolis—Three students in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IUPUI School of Science competed in this year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, placing 46th out of 427 schools in the nation. The math students who represented IUPUI were Croix Gyurek, Sarah Hiatt, and Zach Wilcher. Rodrigo Perez, Ph.D., associate professor, served as the faculty mentor for the IUPUI students competing.
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is the preeminent mathematics competition for undergraduate college students in the United States and Canada. It features both a team and individual competition. Perez has been mentoring the IUPUI team since 2005, and each year, he works with the math club to identify students who are interested in competing so they can practice during the fall semester.
“I run practice sessions where they learn special theory for competitions and solving strategies. They also have to learn how to report their solutions to maximize points,” explains Perez.
It’s important for competitors to understand the points because of the way the competition problems are scored. Competitors work to solve 12 questions over the course of six hours. Problems are worth 10 points each. Competitors can receive eight, nine, or 10 points if the solution is correct with minor defects. They’ll earn zero, one, or two points if they don’t show a full solution. This ensures only solutions that are essentially correct count toward high scores.”
“The problems involve EVERYTHING a math major may expect to see in courses beyond calculus and are not simple computations,” says Perez. “I usually tell students that solving one problem is already CV worthy, because an infamous fun fact about the Putnam is that the median score, the score of the student in the middle of the pack, is 0. More than half of the participating students do not earn a single point!”
One of the IUPUI competitors, Croix Gyurek, solved four problems, and even received a perfect score of a 10 on three of the four problems he attempted. Gyurek finished the competition individually ranking 112 out of 2975 competitors. He was one of only two Indiana students to place in the top 200.
Gyurek also competed in the 2019 Putnam. To prepare for this year’s competition, he spent time working on the 2020 problems.
“It's always fun to have these problems that I know are solvable, and it's just a matter of thinking them through,” explained Gyurek. “Many of them require great creativity and non-obvious thinking—it's just the kind of challenge I enjoy.”
Gyurek is an IUPUI senior who is planning to continue his studies and earn a Ph.D. in an area that combines math and computer science. He says competing is helping him reach his goal.
“It definitely helped improve my thinking skills, although personally, in the future I would also like to start branching into problems with longer time scales, where I'm allowed to collaborate with humans and computers,” says Gyurek “But having faster-paced challenges feels like it keeps me sharp.”
Sarah Hiatt, another team member, agrees that the Putnam has helped her prepare for her career. Hiatt is also senior this year and plans to become an actuary after graduation.
“What I like about the Putnam, and most math competitions, is you have to solve a problem with limited information. When you're an actuary, you rarely have as much information or data as you would like. Putnam teaches you to think ‘What can I do with this information?’ instead of ‘There's no way I can solve this problem,’” explains Hiatt. “Most of the time, you can do a great deal more with what you are given than you initially thought.”
The Putnam Competition takes place the first Saturday of December each year. It began in 1938 as a competition between mathematics departments at colleges and universities but has grown to be the leading university-level mathematics competition in the world. The top five competitors are named Putnam Fellows and are guaranteed scholarships at Harvard.
