Xuerui Yang, a senior majoring in mathematics, placed in the top 6 percent at the Putnam Mathematical Competition.
A team of three undergraduate students from the College of Arts and Sciences’ (A&S) Department of Mathematics recently finished 58th out of 488 participating institutions in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. The math contest is the preeminent mathematics competition for undergraduate college students in the United States and Canada and is organized by the Mathematical Association of America.
According to Leonid Kovalev, professor and associate chair for undergraduate studies in the mathematics department, this is the highest ranking for a team from Syracuse University in at least a decade.
Connor Ritchie, a freshman majoring in mathematics, placed in the top 30 percent.
Connor Ritchie, a freshman majoring in mathematics, placed in the top 30 percent of all participants; Yantao Wu, a junior majoring in mathematics and physics, placed in the top 15 percent; and Xuerui Yang, a senior majoring in mathematics who is also a Newton Fellow, placed in the top 6 percent.
Competing students spent six hours working on 12 challenging problems, covering a wide range of mathematical topics. Answering the questions required creative thinking and the ability to support claims with rigorous proofs.
To prepare for the competition, the students attended weekly training sessions during the fall semester coached by Kovalev and Anusha Krishnan, the Philip T. Church Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematics.
Yantao Wu, a junior majoring in mathematics and physics, placed in the top 15 percent.
“The training sessions and the competition itself develop problem-solving abilities that propel students to success beyond their undergraduate career,” Kovalev says. “Success in the Putnam competition increases the chance of admission to competitive graduate programs.”
