Description:

Richard Feynman's Personally Owned William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition Award, Ex-Sotheby's, Ex-Richard P. Feynman Family

A prestigious mathematics award presented to future Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) in 1939 by the William Lowell Putnam Intercollegiate Memorial Fund. Ex-Sotheby's, Ex-Richard P. Feynman Family.

The medal is shaped like a cartouche and depicts a standing crane surrounded by fourteen crosses. The reverse reads "The / William / Lowell / Putnam / Inter / Collegiate / Prize." No markings but gold-toned. The medal is housed in the original case, a black leather hinged box with "The / William / Lowell / Putnam / Inter / Collegiate / Prize / 1939" embossed in gilt on the lid. The award hooks onto a mount projecting from the maroon velvet lining inside. The case shows expected wear commensurate with age including rubbing, else near fine. The original Sotheby's auction tag is discretely adhered to the bottom of the box with Japanese fiber tape. The medal measures approximately .375" wide x .875" long; the box measures 2" x 2.5" x .5."

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition was established by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam (1862-1935), the philanthropist widow of banker William Lowell Putnam (1861-1923) in the 1930s. It has been offered annually since 1938 and is currently administered by the Mathematical Association of America. The competition, open to undergraduates in the United States and Canada, awards cash prizes and scholarships to top-scoring individual students and school teams. The exam consists of a set of incredibly challenging mathematical problems; the median score is usually zero.

Richard Feynman, then enrolled at M.I.T., was 1 of 5 top individual scorers of the Putnam Competition in 1939, which entitled him to a Putnam Fellowship (a stipend as well as free tuition to Harvard.) Feynman received the highest score in the U.S. by a very large margin. This was pretty impressive considering that during college, Feynman began to realize that he preferred physics to advanced mathematics!

Even more remarkable than Feynman's stellar performance at the Putnam Competition in 1939 was his inability to recall the name of the competition or know whether it was still in existence 30 years later. The American Institute of Physics has transcribed five sessions of Richard Feynman's Oral Histories recorded at Altadena, California between March 1966 and February 1973. During the second session, recorded on March 5, 1966, Feynman was asked by interviewer Charles Weiner to recall the process of applying to graduate school. Below is an excerpt from their interview. The competition which Feynman can not name is clearly the Putnam Competition. Feynman explains how he sat on the M.I.T. college team as a substitute and completely outstripped his teammates as well as other North American competitors:

Feynman: "There was a mathematics exam for college, not an exam but a contest — it was like an exam, whoever got the best thing won something. I don’t know whether this was Pi Mu Epsilon? No, some other exam. Some big mathematics competition. And the math department didn’t have enough good men. They had to have three men on a team, or five men on a team, or something. And so they called me and said, 'You used to be in mathematics, would you enter the contest?' I said, 'Look, I’m not in mathematics. Mathematics students are learning a lot of stuff that I don’t know and they’re in the other colleges, and I don’t think I can do it.' They said, 'Well, look, we need the guy, so why don’t you do it, just to —?' I said, 'Ok.' Really, it wasn’t false modesty. It was a big surprise to me, what happened. Because then they gave you some old exams. They were happy that somebody, that they had enough guys, you know, so they gave me some old exams, and I went through them to see the kind of problems that they had. And they were quite difficult in certain ways, in other ways not, and I had to review some subjects, like analytic geometry, which I had forgotten, partly, to do certain problems. I worked a little bit at it, but I didn’t take it very seriously. I was sort of sitting in, you know? Then the exam thing came around, and one of the prizes was that one of the winners, one of the five, would be chosen for a scholarship to Harvard for the graduate school — I believe, if I remember right. The method, as I understood it, was they didn’t want to take the winner, because they didn’t want to be stuck with a nut of some sort, by accident, right? So they made it that out of the first five they could choose, Ok? Anyway, I was among the first five. I have since found out from somebody from Canada, where it was scored, who was in the scoring division—he came to me much later and he told me that it was astonishing. He said that at this examination, 'Not only were you one of the five, but the gap between you and the other four was sensational.' He told me that. I didn’t know that. That may not be correct, but that’s what I heard."

Weiner: "First five nationally, or among certain states or schools?"

Feynman: "The whole nation. Yeah. It was quite a thing. I was surprised."

Weiner: "There is a national mathematics competition that still exists."

Feynman: "I think it still exists."

Feynman was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. His many contributions to the field of theoretical physics include research/discoveries in quantum computing, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, particle physics, nanotechnology, and the fluidity of elements based on temperature.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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