First Years Impress in Putnam Competition

The results of the nationwide 2022 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition were recently announced, and Mohamed Omar, associate professor of mathematics, holder of the Joseph B. Platt Chair in Effective Teaching and coach of the Putnam Seminar, shared Harvey Mudd College student rankings.

Adam Tang ’26 placed in the top 200 of all competitors continent-wide, and Tiger Che ’25, Ian Shors ’23, Maxwell Thum ’23 and Nicole Wu ’26 placed in the top 500 of all competitors continent-wide.

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduates in North America. This scholastic year, the contest took place Dec. 3, 2022, with 3,415 students participating from 456 institutions. The competition takes place over six hours with two three-hour sessions of six proof-based math problems (worth 10 points), each from throughout undergraduate mathematics. The top score of all competitors was 101 out of 120 points, but the average score was approximately 8.2; the median score was one.

The Putnam Competition has been offered annually since 1938 to regularly enrolled undergraduates in the United States and Canada who have not yet received a college degree. Harvey Mudd students first participated in the Putnam competition on Dec. 2, 1961. In 1991, the Harvey Mudd team earned third place.