For the second consecutive year Hamilton’s Mathletics Team has won the Snow Bowl competition, edging out teams from Colgate University, Skidmore College and St. Lawrence University. Each team’s top five scores on the William Lowell Putnam Exam, given in December, were added together to determine the winner.
In addition to winning the Snow Bowl, the team earned a national rank of #88 (out of all colleges and universities in the US and Canada) on the Putnam exam. The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is the preeminent mathematics competition for undergraduate college students in the U.S. and Canada.
Each December, over 2,000 students spend two 3-hour sessions solving 12 problems. Prizes are awarded to the participants with the highest scores and to the departments of mathematics of the five institutions whose teams obtain the highest rankings.
Fifteen Hamilton students participated: Chenchen Zhao ’18, Alex Black ’19, Benjamin Oltsik ’19, Ryan Tamburrino ’19, Jinghong Wang ’19, Alex Dennis ’18, Levi Lorenzo ’19 , Sarah Hoover ’18, Elise LePage ’18, Luke Cechura ’19, Spencer Woolfson ’20, Chengqi Guo ’20, Omar Beesley ’20, Benjamin Parfitt ’19, and Ben Drebing ’17.
Coached by Associate Professor of Mathematics Andrew Dykstra, the team trained for the Putnam Exam throughout the fall semester.
"This year's team benefited from the help of Visiting Assistant Professor Dave Perkins, who came to every meeting throughout the fall semester and often contributed intriguing problems for students to think about,” said Dykstra.
Dykstra said being ranked is an accomplishment in itself. “We don’t always score high enough to be ranked like this. Our highest ranking ever was our legendary #29 rank in 1995. Another notable year was 2012, when the team was ranked #42,” he said.
