Putnam Competition: What It Is, Who Takes It, and Why It Matters

When you hear Putnam Competition, the most prestigious undergraduate mathematics contest in the United States, administered by the Mathematical Association of America since 1938. Also known as the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, it’s not a class, not a course, and not something you prepare for in a typical lecture hall. It’s a 6-hour marathon of six problems that require deep creativity, not memorization. Only about 4,000 students take it every year — mostly from top U.S. and Canadian universities — and half of them score zero. That’s not a typo. The problems are designed to be unsolvable by brute force. You don’t need to know advanced theorems. You need to see patterns others miss.

The USAMO, the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad, a high school-level competition that serves as the gateway to the International Mathematical Olympiad, is brutal. But the Putnam is worse. It doesn’t care if you aced AP Calculus. It doesn’t care if you’re the valedictorian. It asks: Can you solve a problem that no one has taught you how to solve? That’s why so many top math students from India — who dominate the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world’s most prestigious math contest for high schoolers, where countries like China and South Korea consistently rank #1 — still find Putnam problems terrifying. It’s not about how much you know. It’s about how clearly you think under pressure.

What makes the Putnam unique is who wins. It’s not always the student with the highest GPA. It’s the one who spends nights scribbling on napkins, who sees connections between geometry and number theory that no textbook mentions. The top scorers often end up in PhD programs at MIT, Stanford, or Princeton — not because they were the best in class, but because they proved they can solve problems no one else can. And that’s why colleges and tech firms pay attention. Google, Microsoft, and quant hedge funds know: if you can crack a Putnam problem, you can crack anything.

Below, you’ll find real stories and insights from people who’ve faced this test — from those who barely scraped by to those who ranked among the top 5 in the country. You’ll learn why some students spend years preparing, why others walk in cold and still win, and what the top scorers do differently. This isn’t about memorizing formulas. It’s about training your brain to think in ways most people never learn.