David Zikel '20
All Stories

On his first try, Carthage student David Zikel ’20 scored among the top 8 percent of all students in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.

The Putnam Competition is considered the preeminent exam for undergraduate math students in the United States and Canada. Competitors have six hours to answer 12 famously challenging questions.

Released in February, the results showed that David was one of six competitors from Wisconsin colleges and universities to rank in the top 500 — the other five all attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The mathematics and computer science major earned perfect scores for his solutions to two of the problems. 

“The Math Department is incredibly proud of his accomplishment,” said Professor Haley Yaple, his proctor for the exam here on campus in December 2019. “We all have seen that David is an excellent student in terms of his technical ability, intellect, and writing skills, among his other talents, but this national ranking is sort of a cherry on top of all the other work he has done.”