“But we've been working towards this Top 10 finish for years, trying to show that we can compete with the top programs in the country and it paid off."įorty other students vied for the final spot on the team, and the suspense lasted beyond kickoff. “I don't talk a lot of trash or anything like that,” Dittmer said. As a national math champ in high school, Dittmer received offers from Stanford and MIT but ultimately signed with BYU. For Dittmer, beating Stanford proved especially sweet. “I stayed in the room where we took the test for a while, talking with my teammates, kind of like someone playing their last football game might stay on the field for a bit longer after the game than normal to soak in the final moments,” Golze said.Įntering the season, both Dittmer and Golze had secured spots on the three-student roster. When the final seconds ticked off the clock, it finally hit home that his days competing for BYU were over. The Cougars were led by a 50-point effort from the senior Golze. It’s so challenging that sometimes half the participants don’t score a single point. Since 1938, thousands of the nation’s top college math students compete annually in this grueling six-hour exam. “They’re going to have to take us seriously now that our name is up there with the big boys.”īYU undergrads Hiram Golze, Sam Dittmer and Peter Baratta wrote their way into BYU’s record books with their performance in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.
“This means a lot – it tells the world that we are doing great things here,” said BYU math professor Tyler Jarvis. The limelight is tricky for many star athletes, but fame’s learning curve is no problem for a trio of star mathletes.Ī year after their rap music video caught the nation’s attention, the BYU mathletes lived up to the hype with a 7th place finish in the nation’s mathematical equivalent of March Madness – beating out math powerhouses such as Stanford, Cal-Tech, Duke, Michigan and UC-Berkeley along the way.
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