Promoting the Next Generation of Putnam Competition Winners
Alumni Hui Jin and Yingying Liu hope their new family fund will encourage more undergraduates to compete in the prestigious Putnam math competition and translate their skills into research and engineering.
Hui Jin (BS '98, MS '99, PhD '01) and his wife, Yingying Liu (MS '98), are establishing an endowed $150,000 fund to encourage Caltech undergraduates to compete in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Considered one of the most demanding undergraduate math competitions in the world, the competition has featured such past winners—known as Putnam Fellows—as Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman.
The Jin Family Fund for Mathematical Excellence will support as many as three annual prizes for Caltech students participating in the Putnam. Two will recognize the highest overall performances, and a third will go to the top-performing student from the Division of Engineering and Applied Science with the intention of promoting advanced mathematics among engineering students.
As an undergraduate, Jin entered the Putnam three times and represented Caltech on its three-person team during his first two years. In his second year, Caltech placed among the top five teams, while Jin finished among the top 20 students. The Putnam attracts participants from the United States, Canada, and Mexico who individually solve 12 challenging problems in six hours. Each institution's top three scorers determine its team standing.
From Chinese Mathematical Olympiad to Caltech
Jin first encountered the Putnam years before he could imagine competing in it. In elementary school, he regularly read a Chinese newspaper that collected articles from publications abroad. One day, a small item caught his attention. It described an American competition called the Putnam and included symbols he could not yet decipher.
"I loved math so I looked at the questions," he says. "They looked very interesting, even though I didn't understand them."
Jin clipped the item and saved it in a notebook alongside stamps, historical facts, and other curiosities. More than a decade later, he arrived at Caltech and saw a notice for the Putnam on a classroom bulletin board. He recognized it immediately.
"I was like, 'Wow, I can do this,'" he says.
The clipping was not Jin's first encounter with competitive mathematics. A third grade teacher in China encouraged him to enter a citywide competition in Shanghai. Jin had no formal training, but he enjoyed math, often becoming absorbed by the challenging problems tucked near the back of his textbooks.
Jin still remembers the final question in that first competition. It was a three-animal variation on the familiar chickens-and-rabbits puzzle: Given the total number of heads and legs in a cage, how many of each animal were inside? He hadn't learned algebra yet, so he couldn't solve it by devising an equation. Instead, he fixed one unknown, tested possibilities for the other two, and relied on instinct to narrow the search before time expired.
"I knew it was going to take a lot of time," Jin says. "I was not sure I could solve it, but in the end, I got it solved. So I was happy."
He won third prize and received a small imitation-leather pouch, which he gifted to his father. The pouch is long gone, but the feeling of finding his way through a challenging problem remains.
"It was very satisfying," he says.
In 1991, Jin earned a perfect score on the American High School Mathematics Examination, now known as the AMC 12. He twice represented Shanghai in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad and, as a high school senior, placed ninth among the final 25 students competing for six places on China's International Mathematical Olympiad team. Jin credits those results with helping him gain admission to Caltech.
Honing Creativity through Competition
These competitions introduced Jin to mathematics beyond the standard curriculum. More lasting was what he calls "the ability to look at some unfamiliar problem and find an angle no one has tried."
That habit would serve him well at Caltech, where he majored in electrical engineering. Jin co-developed irregular repeat-accumulate codes—a method for recovering digital information distorted during transmission that influenced high-speed wireless communication and serves as a critical component in Wi-Fi. While working on his first research paper, Jin realized that a technique he had used in competition could help bound part of a mathematical sequence.
Liu studied mechanical engineering at Caltech before joining Goldman Sachs, where she built technology applications for traders and sales teams. The work eventually drew her toward the market models behind those tools. Then she followed that curiosity into quantitative finance, a career pivot that required her to lean on her Caltech coursework to relearn subjects such as statistics, stochastic calculus, and linear algebra. "Even though I haven't used it for a long time, I feel like Caltech definitely paved a very good foundation," she says.
Jin now leads MathCup Academy, a nonprofit offering K–12 math enrichment, after a career at Qualcomm and Goldman Sachs.
The fund also will support Caltech Math Meet (CMM), an annual competition organized by Caltech undergraduates for high school students in the region and statewide. "It's a really impressive event," says Matt Gherman, the Hearst Teaching Assistant Professor in Mathematics and student club advisor for the CMM. "Our undergraduates plan the event, they write all the problems, they print shirts—they do everything." CMM members provide online resources prior to the event to help those students with less experience in mathematical proofs, and problems are designed not to require literacy in advanced mathematics.
According to Gherman, Caltech students gain valuable leadership and organizational skills while participating high school students leave with a positive experience in problem-solving and critical thinking. "Math has probably the worst PR team," he adds. "We want students to come out of the event enjoying math and thinking about it positively."
Registration is now open for this year's CMM event to be held January 30, 2027.
Jin also hopes experiences gained through competing in the Putnam, the CMM, or other math competitions will attract students to problems that reward creativity over routine methods—and perhaps to advanced courses such as abstract algebra that could sharpen their research.
"They are already good, and they can be better," he says.
A Family Tradition
Liu says she and Jin wanted their gift to reflect the role mathematics has played in their family's lives.
The couple has seen mathematical training shape all three of their children. While their son, Daniel, competes in math competitions their daughters did not. However, the quantitative habits they developed still influence how they reason and learn, according to Liu. "Even though they didn't compete, none of that training in mathematical thinking was lost," she says.
Competition also gave their son a community. The New York City math team introduced him to students from public, private, and specialized high schools. "I really think he started to love math more because of all those friendships he has built," Liu says.
Jin also wouldn't mind seeing Caltech challenge MIT, which has held the Putnam's top team spot for years. Last year, Caltech returned to the top five ranked institutions. "I think it's a good idea to maybe reduce their dominance a little bit," he says. His larger hope, however, is that the competition will leave students with what he calls an "itchiness to learn more advanced math."
The 87th Annual Putnam Competition will be held December 5, 2026.