Students from the Hamilton Mathletics team won first place in the annual Snow Bowl competition, edging out teams from Colgate University, Skidmore College and Saint Lawrence University. To determine the winner each team in the competition added their top five scores on the William Lowell Putnam exam. This year's team score of 98 points is Hamilton's highest score on record (records date back to 1993).
In addition to winning the Snow Bowl, the team earned a national ranking of #65 out of all colleges and universities in the United States. This is Hamilton's second highest national ranking since their #29 ranking in 1995 when the team score was 92 points.
Coached by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Andrew Dykstra, the team consisted of 13 of Hamilton's most talented mathematics students: Jeremy Adelman '13, Mihai Dohotaru '13, Will Eagan '11, Dan Kamenetsky '11, Robert Kosar '12, Giulio Meille '12, Yonghyun Song '13, Nate Taylor '11, Maile Thayer '11, Evan Van Tassell '13, Adam Vorchheimer '11, Ke Xu '11 and Sichen Xu '12. The team trained for the Putnam exam throughout the fall semester before taking it in December.
The Putnam exam took the form of a six- hour written exam, which was broken into two three-hour sessions. As they are every year, the 12 problems on this year's Putnam exam were some of the most challenging problems imaginable. In a typical year, the median score on the exam is only one or two points out of 120 points possible. Since each problem is worth 10 points, it is considered a tremendous accomplishment to answer just one of the 12 problems correctly.
