Testimonials
Should you compete in the Putnam exam? Yeah! I took the Putnam exam all three years at UVA, and it was a fun experience. My first year there were only a few other students who took the exam, but by my third year there were around 15-20, so if you want to fit in with the cool kids these days, you kind of have to do it.
Can you win money by taking the Putnam? Hell yeah! Besides the money given to the top scorers overall, UVa has even given awards to the top scorers at the university. These scores are combined and compared to other schools, and this year we had our best performance in a while. We can do better though, and it starts with you!
(How) should you prepare? My first year I went to some of the Friday problem-solving sessions led by UVa professors; currently Juraj Foldes is running it, and you should contact him if you are interested. These are informal meetings where the Professor talks about a particular area of math that may appear on the exam, and then you work together with the other students to solve some practice problems. It’s a very chill environment and a good way to interact with people interested in math outside of a classroom setting. However, the other two years I was busy so I just did some past problems now and then in random gaps of free time. That was fine too: see https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/ for past problems and detailed solutions. Preparing in advance can help and is part of the fun, but please do not decide not to do the competition just because you feel unprepared. You will never really be prepared anyway, as the exam is a little bit challenging.
What do you need to know for the exam? It depends. If you are super competitive and want to get the top scores, perhaps it is good to be familiar with some theorems in number theory or combinatorics and the like. However, for most people the main hurdle of the exam is not the knowledge itself but rather the difficulty of applying the knowledge. You will most likely not know how to solve any of the problems after first reading them, and that is ok. You are supposed to struggle for a while and try out different approaches. It is sometimes hard to know how much struggle is appropriate/when to give up, especially in the actual timed exam, but this is something that will improve with practice. I would highly recommend reading the solutions for problems that you are not able to solve on your own (after enough struggling), as this will show you new techniques that you can apply to future problems. You may be surprised how many of the problems require only high school math and basic calculus.
When is the exam? The actual exam takes place over a short 6 hours on the first Saturday of December, split into two 3 hour pieces, with 6 problems in each section. Between the sessions there is a 2 hour break during which pizza is consumed. If you want, you could take those 2 hours to discuss the problems from the first 3 hours, and after the exam you could talk even more. This way, you really could get 10+ hours of solid math time. It's truly the best way to procrastinate studying for finals.
What are the strats? I try to focus on the first few problems first because they are supposed to be in order of difficulty. However, it is important to read all the problems because difficulty is subjective and so a problem may be easier/harder for you depending on the type of problems you like to think about. If you want to score well, do not fall into the trap of spending all your time on one problem. However, if you do not care about your score, I know that people also have a lot of fun spending the whole time on the last question because it looks interesting; that is ok too.
--Declan Stacy ('25)