A math department team consisting of Ana Caraiani '07, Andrei Negut '08 and Aaron Pixton '08 placed first in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, marking the first time a team from Princeton has taken the top prize in the contest's 68-year history.
The University team received the competition's highest honors, finishing first out of 507 other university teams. The competition, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America in December, evaluates students' mathematical reasoning abilities through a 12-question exam.
The team's win will result in prizes of $25,000, awarded to the mathematics department to support various student activities, and $1,000 for each winning team member.
Negut and Pixton each finished among the top 15 competitors individually, which garnered them an additional $1,000 each in prize money.
Caraiani placed in the top five as a freshman and a sophomore. This year she received an honorable mention.
"I did my best when I was a freshman and sophomore because I did a lot more problem solving, a lot more of this type of math," she said. "Now I've evolved toward more difficult things and lost touch with it in a way, but I'm still proud that I did well enough to get the team to first place."
Peter Diao '10, who also received an honorable mention in the competition, said the styles of the problems are very similar to those encountered in high school level competitions. "That's why freshmen can do so well," he said.
Pixton declined to be interviewed for this article, and Negut, who is studying abroad in Moscow for the semester, could not be reached for comment.
Caraiani said the University selects team members based on their scores on previous years' tests. "They pick the first three from the previous year's exam, the first three who weren't graduating seniors," she said. "That's been the rule for a really long time."
Diao said the time constraints of the competition were similar to prestigious mathematical competitions for high school students. He compared the Putnam competition to the international high school Math Olympiad, which takes place over two days.
"We were given nine hours per six problems for the Olympiad and only three hours per six problems for Putnam," Diao said. "Just think of it as writing 12 short essays in a day."
Caraiani agreed that the time limits are a significant factor in the competition. "A big part of it is that you really don't have that much time," she said. "So you have to be creative and also be fast at coming up with a solution."
Balin Fleming, a graduate student in the math department who ran practice sessions to help students prepare for the competition, said though the tests administered at the Putnam competition were hard, they are also fair.
"They're very difficult to be sure," he said, "but they're the kind of problems that you could solve and write a good answer to in the time allotted."
Fleming said he took the exam himself a number of times as an undergraduate student. "I thought it was a lot of fun. It takes a certain kind of mentality to enjoy that," he said.
The Putnam competition was established in 1938 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in honor of her late husband William Lowell Putnam.
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