Putnam Trivia for the 90s

The annual Putnam competition has a long and glorious history of identifying extraordinary mathematical talent. Indeed, three Putnam Fellows (top 5 finishers) have won the Fields Medal and two have won a Nobel prize in Physics. In fact, the 1954 Harvard Putnam team included a future Fields Medalist and a future Nobel Laureate! And of course many Putnam Fellows have had distinguished careers starting with the very first winner of the Putnam Fellowship to Harvard-Irving Kaplansky. In the early days (1930s) only a few hundred students competed in the competition whereas by the 1990s over 2000 per year took part. In a 1989 issue of the MONTHLY I gave a list of trivia questions based on the first fifty years of the competition [1]. In this article I offer trivia questions based on the competitions of the 1990s. Answers are given on page 766.