Declaration of resolve

I, Suryarao Bethapudi, on 29th of September 2018, swear to myself, that from now on, in every week, I will work on one problem selected from the Putnam archive.

I will not plagarize the solution (although the solution is available in the archive).

Putnam archive

Link to Putnam archive

Motivation

I didn’t know about the Putnam prize until I was in fourth year (of my undergrad) doing graduate applications when I was checking out Lorenzo Sadun’s Yang Mills mass gap talk.

I decided to be better late than never.

Years from now, after I become a professor (hopefully), I would like to start something similar in Indian colleges and universities.

Edge cases

The rule is simple. One week is one problem.

I do one problem early, I get the next problem ready and start on it right away.

I can’t do a problem in a week, I now have to do two problems.

This is to teach me discipline which I lack. Hehe!

Metric

So, I actually keep track of my progress, I have three metrics:

Metric	Score
Total Questions Done	1
Worked satisfactorily	1
Should have worked harder	0