Putnam Competition
annual mathematics competition for undergraduate students in the United States and Canada
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often truncated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, and Mexico (regardless of the students' nationalities). It awards a scholarship and cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500 for the top students and $5,000 to $25,000 for the top schools, plus one of the top five individual (designated as Putnam Fellows) is awarded a scholarship of up to $12,000 plus tuition at Harvard University (Putnam Fellow Prize Fellowship), the top 100 individual scorers have their names mentioned in the American Mathematical Monthly (alphabetically ordered within rank), and the names and addresses of the top 500 contestants are mailed to all participating institutions. It is widely considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the world, and its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero or one (out of 120) despite being primarily attempted by students specializing in mathematics.
The competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam, who was an advocate of intercollegiate intellectual competition. The competition has been offered annually since 1938 and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America.
Competition layout
The Putnam competition takes place on the first Saturday in December, and consists of two three-hour sittings separated by a lunch break. The competition is supervised by faculty members at the participating schools. Each one consists of twelve challenging problems. The problems cover a range of advanced material in undergraduate mathematics, including concepts from group theory, set theory, graph theory, lattice theory, and number theory.
Each of the twelve questions is worth 10 points, and the most frequent scores above zero are 10 points for a complete solution, 9 points for a nearly complete solution, and 1 point for the beginnings of a solution.
“Putnam Competition” enters the record as annual mathematics competition for undergraduate students in the United States and Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Putnam, Competition and annual can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Putnam Competition” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Putnam, Competition and annual provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8014735. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1927 and 1938.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Putnam Competition”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Putnam Competition primary sources, Putnam Competition archive and Putnam research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Putnam Competition”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Putnam Competition” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.