Each fall at UNO, a small group of dedicated problem solvers give up one Saturday in December to spend the day enjoyably sweating it out against twelve very tough math problems.

The William Lowell Putman Mathematical Competition (founded in 1938) is the premier mathematical collegiate competition in the United States and Canada. Each year, approximately 2,500 enthusiastic undergraduates across both the US and Canada participate in this six hour exam. The problems are tough. Partial credit is rare. And so the median score fluctuates yearly between 1 (out of 120 points) and ZERO!

Last year Andrew Gacek, a freshman majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at UNO, joined our hearty band. And on his first Putnam Exam, he solved four of the twelve problems to receive a score of 40 points. This placed him approximately 86th in the US and Canada.

Asked for a favorite problem from last years exam, Andrew suggested:

PROBLEM 2B Prove that the expression

Here

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