When I got to Harvard, probably the best Putnam/puzzle types of solvers there (among the students) were Don Coppersmith and Angelos Tsiromokos. Don went on to d

When I got to Harvard, probably the best Putnam/puzzle types of solvers there (among the students) were Don Coppersmith and Angelos Tsiromokos. Don went on to do very important work in cryptology. Angelos went on to leave mathematics; his next gig was as a translator for the common market. (He was probably better in word games/puzzles -- Scrabble, crosswords, and so on -- in English than I was, even though it was his third language.) Ofer Gabber and Ron (Ran) donagi also did very well on a semi-formal Putnam, and did so at very young ages. They went on to decent math careers. I also took the Putnam at very young ages, but never cracked the top 100. I went on to leave mathematics. Nat Kuhn was perhaps the best of the undergrads then. He went on to be a psychiatrist. Andy Gleason was perhaps the best at that kind of thing among the faculty. Wonderfully nice guy, and my de jure thesis advisor, which was a bit awkward because he never got a PhD himself and didn't quite understand my stresses; I didn't realize the no-PhD part until after the fact, when I saw his resume in connection with his election as president of the American Mathematical Society.