2014 Putnam Competition Results

group of college students in front of building

The 2014 Putnam results arrived recently, and Stanford had another very good year!

The team consisting of Gyujin Oh, Albert Zhang, and Zhivko Zhechev finished seventh. The top five teams are (1) MIT, (2) Harvard, (3) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, (4) Waterloo, and (5) Carnegie-Mellon.

Here are some highlights from the results this year:

— Seven students received Honorable Mention (HM). They are:

  • Jie Jun (Morris) Ang
  • Vishal Arul
  • Herman Chau
  • Gyujin Oh
  • Huy Pham
  • Brian Wai
  • Albert Zhang

The cutoff for an Honorable Mention was 49 points and a rank of 85.5.

Distribution of students getting HM or higher: MIT (32!), Harvard (11), Carnegie-Mellon (9), Stanford (7), Yale (4), Caltech (3), Princeton (3).

— An additional two students featured in the top 199. They are:

  • Jae Hee Lee
  • Zhivko Zhechev

— Another 10 students finished in the "Honor Roll" of the list of top five hundred students sent out with the Putnam results:

  • James Allen
  • Chitanya Asawa
  • Caroline Ellison
  • Vineet Gupta
  • Zhuodong He
  • Peng Hui How
  • Hiew Pham
  • Sam Redmond
  • Matthew Staib
  • Ying Hong Tham

In all we had 19 students in the "Honor Roll". MIT topped this with 82 students, Carnegie-Mellon (55), Harvard (32), Princeton (15), Caltech (14).

— The cutoff for the honor roll this year was 26 points. Narrowly missing out were Ingerid Fosli, Oluwasanya Awe, Matthew Katzman, Harry Levine, David Xing, Geng Zhao, Boris Perkhounkov, Prithvi Ramakrishnan, Cynthia Day, Raymond Wu, Harrison Ho, Arthur Tsang, and Albert Chen. They all got essentially two questions right.

— Getting one question correct: Mark Holmstrom, Xinyi Jiang, William McCloskey, Peter Ruhm, Grant Sanderson, Ursula Johnson, Ethan Sussman.

Fun Putnam stats:
About 4300 students, 550+ schools. Median score 2. Top score 96. The top five scored between 81–96 points (out of 120). Problems A5, A6, B5, and B6 had interesting point distributions: fewer than a dozen people got credit for these problems.

Congratulations to all our participants on yet another commendable performance!