Faculty of Science

Last week the results of the 73rd Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition were released. Written on the first Saturday in December, the competition was written by more than 4200 top Mathematics and Statistics undergraduates across North America. Acadia students Neil Spencer and Dylan Day placed in the top 500, and both nearly cracked the top 200.

To put this in perspective, of the 41 Canadian universities which had students writing the contest, only 5 schools (Toronto, UBC, Waterloo, McGill, and Montreal) had a larger number of students finish in the top 500.

The competition began in 1938 and is designed to stimulate a healthful rivalry in mathematical studies in the colleges and universities of the United States and Canada. It exists because Mr. William Lowell Putnam had a profound conviction in the value of organized team competition in regular college studies. Mr. Putnam, a member of the Harvard class of 1882, wrote an article for the December 1921 issue of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine in which he described the merits of an intellectual intercollegiate competition. To establish such a competition, his widow, Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, in 1927 created a trust fund known as the William Lowell Putnam Intercollegiate Memorial Fund. The first competition supported by this fund was in the field of English and a few years later a second experimental competition was held, this time in mathematics between two institutions. It was not until after Mrs. Putnam’s death in 1935 that the examination assumed its present form and was placed under the administration of the Mathematical Association of America.