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2015 Putnam Competition Results

group of college students in front of building

The 2015 Putnam results arrived in early April, and Stanford had an excellent year!

The team consisting of Jie Jun (Morris) Ang, Gyujin Oh, and Albert Zhang placed fourth, and Gyujin Oh was among the top six students, becoming Stanford's second Putnam Fellow!

The top five teams are (1) MIT, (2) Carnegie Mellon, (3) Princeton, (4) Stanford, and (5) Harvard.

Here are some highlights from the results this year:

— Putnam Fellow: Gyujin Oh

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

  • James Allen
  • Jie Jun (Morris) Ang
  • Kevin Li
  • Huy Pham
  • Ying Hong Tham
  • Albert Zhang
  • Zhivko Zhechev

The cutoff for an Honorable Mention was 41 points and a rank of 87.5.

Distribution of students getting HM or higher: MIT (32!), Harvard (11), Stanford (8), Carnegie-Mellon (5), and Princeton (10).

— A further 5 students featured in the top 199. They are:

  • Herman Chau
  • Andrew Chen
  • Boris Perkhounkov
  • Brian Wai
  • David Xing

— Another 8 students finished in the "Honor Roll" of the list of top five hundred students sent out with the Putnam results:

  • Bryce Cai
  • Tri Dao Phuc Quang
  • Caroline Ellison
  • Harrison Ho
  • Mark Holmstrom
  • Matthew Katzman
  • Jae Hee Lee
  • Kenneth Smith

In all we had 21 students in the "Honor Roll". MIT topped this with 87 students, Carnegie-Mellon (41), Harvard (23), Waterloo (22), and Princeton (20).

— The cutoff for the honor roll this year was 13 points. Narrowly
missing out were Vineet Gupta, Adam Jaffe, Yelena Mandelshtam, Prasanna Ramakrishnan, Arthur Tsang, and Nina Zubrilina. They all got essentially one questions right.

Fun Putnam stats:
About 4300 students, 550+ schools. Median score 0. Top score 99. The top 6 scored between 82-99 points (out of 120). Problems A6 and B6 had fewer than a dozen students getting any points and, in general, the scores seem lower than in the recent past.
Congratulations to all our participants on yet another commendable performance!