The 2009 Advanced Putnam Training Sessions at UIUC

Problem B3 from the 1998 Putnam asks for the surface area of the portion of the sphere lying above the pentagon.

The advanced Putnam training sessions meet in Altgeld 141 on Tuesdays from 5 pm - 5:50 pm. Each day I plan to pass out a sheet of Putnam problems all on a similar topic. These sheets will be posted here in the event you aren't able to attend, or want to reference them afterwards.

• Advanced training set 1 - 9/22/09.
• Advanced training set 2 - 10/6/09. This session was run by Prof. Hildebrand. He has provided solutions here to the problems.
• Advanced training set 3 - 10/13/09.
• Advanced training set 4 - 10/20/09.
• Advanced training set 5 - 10/27/09.
• Advanced training set 6 - 11/3/09. This session was run by Prof. Hildebrand. He has provided solutions here to the problems.
• Advanced training set 7 - 11/10/09.

If you are interested in reading solutions to the problems I post, there are solutions posted online in a variety of places. I plan to focus on "current" Putnam exams, and so I'll only be selecting problems from the last 24 years (1985-2008).

• For the 1985 and 1986, Alexander Givental (who is running the Fall 2009 Putnam Workshop at Berkeley) has written up solutions to these exams. See his site here.
• For the years 1987-1994 (with the exception of the year 1991), Dave Rusin has solutions from some source posted on hits site.
• For the year 1991, John Scholes used to maintain a Putnam site with Putnam exams from all years, but it no longer exists. However, copies of his site for the 1991 exam are available here.
• For 1995-present, see the fantastic site on the Putnam exam maintained by Kiran Kedlaya, and hosted by AMC. It is here.

Note that carefully writing up solutions is key to earning points, and many of the short and sketchy solutions posted at these sites would not get very many points.