Putnam! Year 3
Dec. 1st, 2007 06:08 pmDavid Coley didn't show up, so Mr. Sally made a last minute substitution and put Sam Raskin on the team. Sam was kind of late, actually; had he been much later, it would have been me instead.
Can't talk about the problems, yet, of course, but as for how I did, I got A2, A3, A5, B1, and B5.
A6 I submitted something that was completely wrong; I started on it very late, heard the 5-minute call, and scribbled down some equations and inequalities I had gotten quickly. The grader is going to be wondering where the hell I took high school algebra, however, as in my hurry I used false statements that I had written down earlier and not crossed out. Turns out, though, had I algebra'd correctly, I wouldn't have gotten it anyway.
B3 - I started by conjecturing a lemma that would let me solve it, calculated the solution that led to, tried to prove it directly, failed - apparently I messed up somewhere; with little time remaining, I wrote down my conjecture and scribbled how to derive a solution from it. Of course, it's very possible the initial conjecture was wrong.
There, I think that's vague enough to avoid helping anyone.
You are going to be so disgusted, however, when I tell you how I did B5.
-Harry
Can't talk about the problems, yet, of course, but as for how I did, I got A2, A3, A5, B1, and B5.
A6 I submitted something that was completely wrong; I started on it very late, heard the 5-minute call, and scribbled down some equations and inequalities I had gotten quickly. The grader is going to be wondering where the hell I took high school algebra, however, as in my hurry I used false statements that I had written down earlier and not crossed out. Turns out, though, had I algebra'd correctly, I wouldn't have gotten it anyway.
B3 - I started by conjecturing a lemma that would let me solve it, calculated the solution that led to, tried to prove it directly, failed - apparently I messed up somewhere; with little time remaining, I wrote down my conjecture and scribbled how to derive a solution from it. Of course, it's very possible the initial conjecture was wrong.
There, I think that's vague enough to avoid helping anyone.
You are going to be so disgusted, however, when I tell you how I did B5.
-Harry
