Harvard Makes Strong Showing at 86th Putnam Mathematical Competition

Harvard scored third place among the winning teams at the 86th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Over 4,300 students from over 480 institutions participated in the highly competitive exam administered by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) this past December. The 2025 Putnam team from Harvard was comprised of math and statistics concentrator Kevin Cong ’26, math and computer science concentrator Andrew Gu ’26, and statistics and math concentrator Radu Andrei Lecoiu ’26. All three received an honorable mention and ranked among the top 100 individuals, as was computer science and math concentrator Shokhruz Kakharov ’27.

The Putnam competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam, an American lawyer and banker, as well as a Harvard alum. It has been administered by the MMA and offered annually since 1938 as a competition between mathematics departments at colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The intense, six-hour exam features 12 proof-based math problems worth 10 points each, and although participants work independently on the problems there is a team aspect to the competition as well. A school’s team consists of its top three scorers, and team ranks are determined by comparing the sums of the scores of the team members. The highest-ranked teams’ math departments and their student members received cash prizes.