by Valerie Shore

Once again, UVic students have shown they're among the top 10 per cent of undergraduate mathematical thinkers in North America.

At this year's Putnam math competition, considered the premier competitive math event for undergraduates in the U.S. and Canada, UVic's three-member team finished 32nd out of 322 schools. Members of the team were Ross Kang, Andrew King and Aidan Roy, whose individual rank was 112th out of 2,818 participants. Other UVic participants were Charles Starling and Dan Vanderster.

The Putnam competition consists of a grueling six-hour examination that poses 12 mathematical problems to participants. "The problems are tough and they require ingenuity, not necessarily advanced mathematical knowledge, to solve," says Dr. Ahmed Sourour (mathematics & statistics), who supervises and coaches UVic's Putnam teams.

The problems are so challenging, says Sourour, that more than half of competitors usually score zero. The winner this year scored 80 per cent, and only 20 students earned a mark higher than 50 per cent. A perfect score is extremely rare.

Although this year's results are not an all-time best for UVic students, the university consistently does well, says Sourour. "We usually rank in the top 10 per cent. In the mid-'90s, our team ranked 14th and 15th and one individual was one of the top 50 scorers three times in a row."

The competition is named after Harvard graduate William Lowell Putnam, who first proposed an intellectual intercollegiate competition. He didn't live to fulfil that dream, but his memorial fund did. It supported the first competition, in the field of English, followed a few years later by one in math. After Putnam's widow died in 1935 the competition assumed its present form and was placed under the administration of the Mathematical Association of America. The top prize in the competition is a Harvard scholarship valued at $12,000 US.

In case you have ambitions for next year's Putnam, here's a sample problem:

Players 1, 2, 3, ... n are seated around a table and each has a single penny. Player 1 passes a penny to player 2, who then passes two pennies to player 3. Player 3 then passes one penny to player 4, who passes two pennies to player 5, and so on, players alternately passing one penny or two to the next player who still has some pennies. A player who runs out of pennies drops out of the game and leaves the table. Find an infinite set of numbers n for which some player ends up with all the pennies.