Locally, the contest was well attended, with nineteen U of I students participating, the highest number in the past twenty years. While depleted senior ranks hurt the U of I team rank (107th, compared to last year's 27th place), there were a number of outstanding individual performances by local contestants.
The top local scorer was David Grayson, a veteran Putnam participant and past winner of the UIUC Undergraduate Math Contest, who graduated in December 2007 with a degree in Engineering Physics. David capped a brilliant undergraduate career with a stellar performance on the Putnam, scoring 38 out of 120 points, and placing 135th among the 3700 participants. This the highest ranking achieved by a local Putnam participant since 2002.
In second and third place among the local Putnam participants were Wanrong Zhang, a junior in mathematics and computer science, with 22 points and a rank of 367, and Michael Nasti, a freshman (with junior standing) in mathematics, with 21 points and a rank of 431. Coincidentally, Zhang and Nasti also took second and third, in the same order, in the 2008 UIUC Undergraduate Math Contest.
The Putnam contest, which has been called by Time Magazine the "World's Toughest Math Test", consists of 12 challenging problems, to be solved over 6 hours. Each problem is graded on a 0-10 point scale, for a maximal total score of 120 points. As in past years, nobody came close to achieving a perfect score: The three highest scores among the 3753 participants were 110, 91, and 90 points. A score of 80 points, or two thirds of the maximal score, was enough to place in the top ten; 60 points was enough for a top 1 percent ranking, and 10 points (corresponding to a single problem solved correctly) guaranteed a place among the top third of all participants.