Three Princeton students placed in the top 15 in the 2002 William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition, leading the University to a second-place finish out of 376 teams across the United States and Canada.
The Putnam exam, dubbed by Time magazine "the most prestigious math contest in the world" and "a rite of passage for math cognoscenti," was taken in December by 3,349 students from 476 schools.
The University's Marius Beceanu '04, Stefan Hornet '04 and Radu Mihaescu '03 each received $1,000 for finishing in the top 15 individually. Mihai Manea '05 also earned an honorable mention.
A school's team score is the sum of the scores of three predesignated students. Princeton's team of Hornet, Manea and Mihaescu took the second-place prize of $20,000 for the math department and $800 for each student.
"They're very talented," said math professor Zoltan Szabo who supervised the administering of the exam at the University. "That's a good advertisement for the math program."
Harvard University, which has won 13 times since 1985, again earned first place this year. Duke, Berkeley and Stanford rounded out the top five.
The Putnam competition consists of 12 questions designed to test a student's problem-solving skills, Szabo said. Some questions involve higher math such as group theory, real analysis and combinatorics.
In 2001, the median score was one point out of a possible 120.
Princeton's performance this year was a sharp improvement from last year's, when the University did not even place among the top 10.
For the past two years, the math department has organized practice sessions with a graduate student in the weeks leading up to the exam. Szabo cited these sessions as a possible explanation for the improvement.
But organized preparation for the exam at the University is limited compared to many schools. At Johns Hopkins University, Georgia Institute of Technology and other schools, students can take a semester-long Putnam preparation course for credit.
For many students, the Putnam is simply a continuation of a multitude of high school math competitions. Hornet, for example, is a math major who won three gold medals at the International Math Olympiad before coming to the University.
He said he enjoys math competitions because "they're challenging, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it."
Szabo estimated that about 25 students took the Putnam at the University — a number comparable to previous years.
In addition to those who won individual recognition, "lots of other students did very well," he added. "The overwhelming result is significantly better than last year."
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