The Putnam exam is a 6-hour math exam, given on the first Saturday of each December. The median score on the exam is usually about 0 or 1, out of 120, so you can see it is a hard exam. But it can be fun, if you are the sort of person who enjoys working on difficult problems. My theory is that everyone who is good enough at math to be interested in taking the exam ought to be able to get 2 problems in the morning and 2 problems in the afternoon, after the weekly problem sessions that I run. So if you are interested, send me some e-mail or come to the practice sessions.
I, Mark Hovey, sometimes run the Putnam practice sessions at Wesleyan, though currently they are being run by David Pollack.
I have some electronic files of old putnam problems and solutions. I wrote the more recent ones myself, and got some of these from Dave Rusin and Kiran Kedlaya. See also this page. For information about the exam, see the official home page. The solutions below are not guaranteed! The most recent files are pdf files, so should open automatically if your browser has the Acrobat plug-in. Otherwise they are LaTeX2e files, with the .tex extension stripped. To make them look nice, download them, add the .tex extension and run them through LaTeX.
Notice I do not have solutions to the 1989, 1991, or 1992 exams. If you do, please send them to me at the address below.
Mark Hovey