The 48th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition was held on 5 December 1987, a cold Saturday morning. It consisted of two periods of exactly three hours each with a two-hour break between the two sessions. There were six problems for each session.

Each problem was graded on a basis of 0 to 10 points. For the 1987 competition, there were more than 2,170 individual contestants from 359 colleges and universities in Canada and the United States. Teams were entered by 277 institutions. The median score was 1 (meaning less than half of the contestants had a score of more than 1 point)! The cutoff point for the top 200 contestants was 26. The cutoff point for Honorable Mention was 49.

I was among the top 49 contestants and received Honorable Mention.

I spent most Monday evenings of my undergraduate Fall terms training with the Putnam team on the 5th floor of the University of Waterloo MC building.

The coffee and donuts were unforgettable, as were the fellow mathies there (among them were Frank D’Ippolito, Mike Molloy, Eric Veach, and Minh Tue Vo). I still have fond memories, but have lost touched with them. The trainers: Michael Albert, Ken Davidson, Bruno Forte, Ian Goulden, David Jackson, Chris Small, and Cecil Rousseau never failed to stump us with interesting problems.