Prep Courses
Each fall, the department offers a pair of 1-credit P/NP courses to help students prepare for these competitions. MATH 269 is preparation for the Putnam Competition or the Missouri Collegiate Math Competition, and CSCI 293 prepares students for the ACM Programming Contest.
These courses are open to anyone, and are independent of the competitions: You can participate in the competitions without taking a course, and you can enroll in the courses without competing.
The Putnam Competition
- Contest
- William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition
- When
- Early December. One Saturday.
- Contact
- Dr. Greg Marks (marks@member.ams.org)
- More Info
- Putnam Announcement
The Putnam Competition is the premier national undergraduate mathematics contest, held on the first Saturday of December each year since 1938. Approximately 3,500 undergraduate
students representing 500 colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada compete. Registration
is free. In addition to awarding cash prizes (up to $2,500) to top scorers, the Mathematical Association of America will
publish the names and schools of the top 500 students. A
good performance can bring great prestige to both you and the university.
The Mathematical Contest in Modeling
- Contest
- Mathematical Contest in Modeling
- When
- Early February. Problems distributed 8PM Thursday, due 8PM the following Monday.
- Contact
- Dr. David Jackson (jacksoda@slu.edu)
- More Info
- The MCM at SLU
The Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications, COMAP, annually conducts a Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) for teams of three undergraduate college students. Three member teams of college students receive two mathematical modeling questions at 8PM EST on Thursday of the contest weekend. They will choose one of these two questions to solve and complete a written report explaining and analyzing their solution of this problem by 8PM EST on Monday of that weekend.
Teams are expected to use mathematics much as professionals use mathematics: on open-ended problems that originate in a variety of other disciplines and are only indirectly related to standard textbook problems. The competition provides excellent practical mathematics experience as well as time management skills, teamwork skills and technical writing skills.
The ACM Programming Contest
- Contest
- http://icpc.baylor.edu
- When
- Usually first Saturday in November
- Contact
- Dr. Michael Goldwasser (goldwamh@slu.edu)
- More Info
- SLU's Programming Team
Each year the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) holds the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Students work in teams of three to solve as many problems as possible in a five-hour time period. The available programming languages for the contest are C++ and Java.
Regional competition is held each Fall in St. Louis and other midwest locations, and top 2 teams from our region travel to World Finals the following Spring.
The Missouri Collegiate Mathematics Contest
- Contest
- http://www.math-cs.ucmo.edu/~hchen/contest/
- When
- Late April. Trip lasts Thursday afternoon-Saturday afternoon.
- Contact
- Dr. Bryan Clair (bryan@slu.edu)
- More Info
- The MCMC at SLU
The Missouri Collegiate Mathematics Competition is a team event open to any college or university in the state of Missouri. The competition takes place at a different Missouri university each year. SLU generally sends two teams of three undergraduates to compete, and typically 30-40 teams attend the competition.
The contest consists of challenging mathematical problems, comparable but not quite as difficult as the Putnam Exam. There are two 2.5 hour sessions, one Thursday night and one Friday morning. Friday afternoon and Saturday the team stays for the Missouri MAA Section Meeting, a math conference with plenty of interesting activities for undergraduates.
