Definition
Plain language
A famously hard university-level math competition in the U.S. and Canada.
As stated in the literature
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, an undergraduate proof-and-problem contest whose problems serve as a high-difficulty benchmark for automated theorem-proving systems.
Also called: Putnam competition
Why it matters: Its notoriously hard problems make it a demanding yardstick for whether an AI can really do rigorous mathematics.
For example, a Putnam problem might ask you to prove a surprising fact about numbers that has no obvious starting point and stumps most strong math students.
Heard on the show
“… brutal this work usually is: the authors cite prior efforts where getting an agent to solve one Putnam question ran up to a thousand dollars and thirty-four hours, and one textbook-formalization project …”Episode 188 — A Coding Agent Found a Hole in a Peer-Reviewed STOC Proof for Five Dollars