One of the most beautiful Putnam preparation books is the 1985-2000 collection by Kiran S. Kedlaya, Bjorn Poonen, and Ravi Vakil. Available from the MAA or e.g. Amazon.

Older Materials

• ``Practice Putnam'' questions (1 1/2 hours) from Tuesday Oct. 3, 2006.
• Information Sheet from the 2006 organizational meeting.
• The pigeon-hole principle
• Integration and summation
• Modular arithmetic
   (solutions)
• Inequalities, maxima and minima
• Recurrence and sequences
• Induction, inclusion-exclusion, and parity
• Geometry
• Non-existence and fun facts
• Polynomials and symmetric functions
• Polynomial Session Slides here in 72 dpi format 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9| 10| 11| 12| 13| 14 or here in 150 dpi 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9| 10| 11| 12| 13| 14.

Some Resources

William Lowell Putnam Competition Archive.

Excellent source for solutions 1995-present.

John Scholes Putnam Problems

Huge and amazingly complete, but with rephrasings due to copyright needs, and often brief solutions.

John Scholes IMO site.

International Math Olympiad Problems are sometimes at a similar level to Putnam ones.

Dave Rusin's Putnam Page

Official Awards Site

Google Problem Archives Pointers

Official Website for Putnam Competition

American Mathematical Monthly via JSTOR

Archives here contain annual writeups (e.g. Oct. 85-87, 89, 93-98) of the competition. More months listed here.

Prof. Kahan's Berkeley Preparation Notes

Many years worth in one place.

Canadian IMO Site

Putnam Fellow

from the Wikipedia. Includes some interesting historical information.

E-mail to

putnam@math.cornell.edu

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Last Update: September 25, 2007