Nineteen UML students spent six hours on December 3, 2022 competing in the 83rd annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition. Every year, thousands of students in the United States and Canada enter the competition. In each of two 3-hour sessions, they work on six difficult problems without the aide of any technology. One of the problems this year was

Let n be an integer greater than or equal to 2. Over all real polynomials p(x) of degree n, what is the largest possible number of negative coefficients of p(x)²?

Student solutions are graded by a committee of the Mathematical Association of America and results will be announce in a few months. They will appear on the Putnam Archive: https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/. Professor Kenneth Levasseur supervised the competition at UML.