Lucy Luo ’16 scored in the top 500 out of 4,275 national competitors on this year’s Putnam Competition, an annual math competition for undergraduates. “I think it’s awesome that we have students that are excited about math and that we have outlets for them to use that excitement and get some recognition,” said Lecturer in Mathematics Michael King. King, along with Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Program and Lecturer in Mathematics Eric Gaze, organizes the Putnam Competition each year at Bowdoin, a six-hour test taken in December. The median of the exam this year was zero, which is lower than in previous years. To be in the top 500, one had to earn a score of 12. Out of the 447 participating schools, including large research universities like MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, Bowdoin ranked in the top 15 percent at 62nd, 38 spots higher than last year’s rank of 100.