For the third year in a row, the Hamilton Mathletics team won first place in the annual Snow Bowl competition, edging out teams from Colgate University, Skidmore College and St. Lawrence University. To determine the winner, each team in the competition added their top five scores on the William Lowell Putnam Exam.
In addition to winning the Snow Bowl, the team earned a ranking of #43 out of all participating colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. This is Hamilton's second highest rank since their legendary #29 rank in 1995. Also, the team as a whole earned more points this year (115 points) than any other year on record (the 1995 team earned 92 points).
Coached by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Andrew Dykstra, the team consisted of 12 of Hamilton’s most talented mathematics students: Jeremy Adelman ’13, Julian Aronowitz ’14, Sitong Chen ’16, Yifei Chen ’13, Robert Huben ’15, Jessie Shelton ’15, Justin Smith ’14, Josh Snyder ’13, Sunrose Shrestha ’14, Yonghyun Song ’13), Peter Talpey ’14, and Evan Van Tassell ’13. The team trained throughout the fall semester before taking the Putnam in December.
The Putnam 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 exam were some of the most challenging problems imaginable. In fact, in a typical year, the exam is so challenging that the median individual score is zero out of 120 points possible. It is a tremendous accomplishment, then, that eight out of the 12 Hamilton students who took the exam earned at least one point.
