Grand Junction Man On Top Colorado State Mathematics Team
Friday, April 17, 1998
Grand Junction resident Zachary Harris was a member of a
team of mathematical problem-solvers from Colorado State
University that placed 30th out of 419 colleges and universities
in the 58th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical
Competition. Harris, a senior majoring in mathematics, ranked
first from Colorado in the 1995 Putnam competition.
The Colorado State students accomplished the feat last Dec.
6 by tackling 12 questions such as, "Show that there do not exist
four points in the Euclidean plane such that the pairwise
distances between the points are all odd integers." Winners were
announced at the end of March.
Mathematics Professor Richard Osborne, who coached the
Colorado State group, said that out of a possible 120 points, the
average score was one. Team scores are not made available, but
five Colorado State competitors ranked in the top quarter of
test-takers nationally and one was in the top five percent in the
nation, earning the highest score of any Colorado entrant.
"Most mathematics professors can't just look at one of these
problems and tell you how to do it," said Osborne, himself a one-
time Putnam competitor. "I can do some of them in an hour if I
really go after the problem. Some I get stuck on, and some I
could never solve."
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is funded
by the Putnam Fund for the Promotion of Scholarship and
administered by the Mathematical Association of America.
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