Students Claim Math Victory

For the second consecutive year—and the ninth time in the past 15 years—a team of three Harvard undergraduates won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.

The winning team members were Arnav Tripathy ’11, Iurie Boreico ’11, and Zachary R. Abel ’10, each of whom received a $1,000 award for their victory in the team competition.

The six-hour, 12-question exam was administered by the Mathematical Association of America in the first week of December. A total of 3,627 students from 545 colleges in the United States and Canada participated. The premier undergraduate mathematics competition covers fields such as group theory, set theory, graph theory, and number theory.

Results were released by the Harvard mathematics department on Monday, and one Harvard participant attributed his victory partly to serendipity.

“I’m very happy to help the team,” Boreico said. “I almost forgot to register for the Putnam. Luckily I got an email reminder right before the deadline.”

For the second year in a row, Tripathy was named a Putnam fellow—an honor given to the five highest scorers on the exam. He received a prize of $2,500.

Tripathy could not be reached for comment.

“I didn’t prepare for it at all,” Boreico said. “I did a lot of math competitions in high school and stopped preparing for them in college.”

The exam is not representative of pure mathematics, according to Boreico.

“It’s different because of the limited amount of time,” he said. “The questions are much easier than math research questions but you have to be very quick and careful.”

Teams of three students are chosen to represent their schools each year, but students can also participate individually.

Boreico and Alex Zhai ’12 were among the top 16 ranking individuals, each winning a prize of $1,000.

“My laptop’s broken,” said Boreico. “I’ll spend the money on a new one.”

Abel placed among the next nine highest ranking individuals in the competition.

Kevin Carde ’09, Zhou Fan ’09, Rosen D. Kralev ’09, Yi Sun ’09, Dmitry Vaintrob ’11, Ameya A. Velingker ’09 and Neal Wadhwa ’09 all received honorable mentions.

Behind Harvard, teams from Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and Caltech rounded out the top five teams this year.

—Staff writer Michael J. Ding can be reached at ding2@fas.harvard.edu