Hillsdale’s Math Team ranked third in the state in the Putnam Mathematical Competition. Courtesy | Pexels
The Hillsdale College Math Team ranked third in Michigan in the annual Putnam Mathematical Competition. Sophomore Andrew Schmidt scored the highest on the team with 31 points and ranked 254th out of 3,988 contestants.
“We beat all the liberal arts colleges, kind of our peer institutions. Then you look at universities like Grand Valley State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Saginaw Valley — some of these places are 15 times our size, and we beat them,” said Associate Professor of Mathematics and Math Team Adviser David Gaebler. “The only places that beat us are University of Michigan and Michigan State, and they’re both over 50,000 enrollments. I’m pretty happy about being third in the state.”
The test was proctored in person on campuses across the U.S. and Canada on Dec. 7, 2024. The test includes six hours of math with a two hour break at the halfway mark. Of 120 points, the median score this year was a 2.
“Most of the things being tested are high school things — lists of integers, geometric figures. A motivated 10th grader could know what they’re being asked, but they would not know how to do it,” Gaebler said. “It’s designed that way to test problem solving and cleverness, as opposed to knowledge. You don’t become good at the Putnam by taking a lot of classes and doing a lot of homework and just sort of putting one foot in front of the other.”
Every Thursday, the math team meets to do old Putnam test questions. Gaebler said now that the club is largely student run, the mathematicians split into small groups to work through the problems on their own. Schmidt, as the team captain, is in charge of scheduling meetings, picking and printing the practice problems, and leading the discussions. He broke the school record last year as a freshman with a score of 41 points.
“The way I was taught math, [failure] was a massive part of the learning curve,” Schmidt said “I had to write a proof every week. And there were some weeks where all afternoon I would be pacing my room, like, ‘What on earth, I cannot solve this stupid problem.’ But being able to shut the mindset down of ‘oh, I can’t get past this’ and work through it was a big part of math for me, especially in competition.”
Schmidt said the Putnam is not for everyone, but the six-hour Saturday test has its benefits.
“It lets you step out of the classroom and sort of feel math as something more dynamic and more like what it actually is in research, or like historically, as these things are being discovered,” Schmidt said. “If that’s something that is exciting and you’re willing to maybe fail, but also take a chance at seeing something really cool, then go for it. And, there’s no such thing as flunking the Putnam.”
His first competition with the team, freshman Levi Dittman came away with one point this year.
“I think most of us who do it, we just really enjoy problem solving,” Dittman said. “There’s a bit of a feeling of accomplishment when you’re done, but I’d say it’s mostly the first thing. We just really love solving mathematics problems.”
For Dittman and many others, math is a creative endeavor, using set rules, theorems, and proofs to solve a wide array of problems.
“Oftentimes, there’s not necessarily a single way to solve the problem, and most of the time, we’re not going to have any idea of how to solve it at the outset,” Dittman said. “You need to parse it, understand it, and then figure out a line of attack and follow through. It’s not something that you can boil down to a single recipe.”
According to Gaebler, the well-rounded liberal arts education that attracts students like Dittman, Schmidt, and sophomore Ben Bassett is good preparation for a test like the Putnam.
“Andrew is big on music. He sings in the chamber choir. He’s an elite classical guitarist,” Gaebler said. “Ben is a physics and math double major and loves computer programming. These students, they’re not one-dimensional. I think that helps them in the kind of creativity that’s involved. I think maybe people who are a little bit less broad in their interests have a harder time coming up with something original that they haven’t seen before.”
