I took the Putnam at Harvard ca 1948, and didn't do particularly well. I have an interesting recollection of it, though. Andy Gleason was the coach, and after each session of five questions (morning and afternoon) he offered us the choice of going for lunch or staying to to discuss the questions. Needless to say we all stayed. Gleason gave solutions to ALL the problems, giving more than one solution to several of them. All his solutions were quite elegant. I remember one of the problems, and his astounding approach to the solution. It asked how many roots of a given quintic polynomial have positive real part. I could probably reconstruct the polynomial (or one that would do just as well). -- --rollo <rollos@starband.net>