David Kraines has worked hard to recruit talented math students and help them prepare for the Putnam.
“ For him it is a labor of love,” says the head of Duke’s math department.

Jon Gardiner

"When I came to Duke in the mid-'80s, Duke's math department was already on a very good trajectory," says Griffiths, who admits that he himself "didn't do all that well" on the Putnam when he was at Wake Forest College, the undergraduate component of Wake Forest University. "We had an excellent chairman, Mike Reed. The Duke [Mathematical] Journal was one of the best. And the TIP program was bringing very bright high-school students from all around the country to Duke for the summer. Also, unlike many large research universities, Duke had a strong commitment to undergraduate education, including a faculty that sought out promising high-school students and convinced them to come to Duke."

Associate professor of mathematics David Kraines compares his department's strategy with that of another winning Duke program. "Mike Krzyzewski doesn't recruit players for his team by going around to dorms looking for tall students. With help from the admissions office, the president, the provost, and members of the math department faculty, we set about recruiting the top high-school math students to come to Duke." A few of the most exceptional of these were awarded merit scholarships.

William Lowell Putnam

The approach began paying off almost immediately. VanderKam applied to Stanford, Princeton, and Duke, but Duke emerged as his top choice because of faculty encouragement and accessibility. "I attended the TIP program the summer after my seventh- and eighth-grade years and had a blast," he says. "That's when I first started thinking about coming to Duke. Then, by the time I was a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Math, I was visiting Duke's math and physics departments on a regular basis because I was doing an independent study project on topology."

Andrew Dittmer, the oldest of seven children, says Duke's "aggressive recruiting" and the offer of a full-tuition Angier B. Duke scholarship made his decision easy. Melanie Wood '03 was another highly sought-after star. At the age of four, she was solving linear equations in her head. She dominated middle- and high-school math competitions—including two silver medals in the International Math Olympiad—and was featured in Discover magazine ("The Girl Who Loved Math").

When considering where to go for college, Wood narrowed her selection to Duke and Harvard. She visited both campuses twice. Despite Harvard's track record for luring math scholars of her caliber, she disliked the "cold and competitive" nature of its department. Duke struck her as "a much friendlier place, where faculty were interested in working with undergraduates, and there was much more collaboration between undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty." She also appreciated the fact that Duke was purposefully recruiting students like her and recognized that she would be with like-minded peers who were valued for their talent and potential.

Wood was selected to represent Duke on two Putnam teams. In 1999, her freshman year, Wood and the team came in third, and her score put her in the top 2 percent of participants. In her senior year, Wood became the first American-born female to become a Putnam Fellow. She was also selected as the recipient of the Morgan Prize, established in 1995, awarded to an undergraduate student for outstanding research in mathematics, for her research on Belyi-extending maps and P-orderings—to date, she is the only woman to receive the award.