UNT's Putnam team places 40th out of 557 participating institutions. | Department of Mathematics
April 1, 2014

UNT's Putnam team places 40th out of 557 participating institutions.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these dedicated students from competing in the seventy-fourth William Lowell Putnam Competition. Led by their dedicated coach, Professor Neal Brand, Kevin Lin, Robert Tung, Pranav Davalla, Ashley Miller, and Mark Fincher braved the Texas snow and ice the first Saturday in December to participate in the Putnam competition. The Putnam competiion is a national mathematics competition for American undergraduates. The competition consists of two three-hour exams, each extremely challenging; in fact, the median exam score nationwide on the Putnam each year is zero, meaning that typically more than half of the students who participate do not get any points.

This year, UNT's team placed 40th from among the 557 participating institutions. This is the best performance by a UNT team since at least 1983 (and probably ever). Kevin Lin was the highest scorer at UNT, and he had one of the top three scores from the entire state of Texas.