A team of three undergraduates grabbed first place honors in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, giving Harvard its first top finish in the national math contest in 17 years.

The Crimson squad of Benji N. Fisher '85, Michael P. Larsen '84, and Michael Raship '83 outscored several hundred other college teams including the California Institute of Technology, Yale, and Princeton.

The contest's exam was given to nearly 2000 undergraduates in early December. University Treasurer George C. Putnam '49, a grandson of the competition's original sponsor, said yesterday "28 young faculty members holed up in a motel over New Year's weekend" to correct the test.

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The three team members each will receive a $500 prize and the Mathematics Department will get a gift of $5000, Putnam said. In addition, one of the individual participants with the top five scores on the exam--whose name has not been announced--will be awarded a Putnam Fellowship, a stipend for two years of study at any Harvard graduate school.

Although they have only received notification of their victory from Putnam and not the contest's committee, the three winners were not surprised by their success.

"I felt very confident that our team had won right after the exam," said Larsen yesterday.

Putnam said yesterday that his grandfather started the competition 43 years ago to promote an intercollegiate contest outside of athletics. Math was selected as the arena "because it's fairly easy to correct," he added.

The victory was the 11th time a Harvard team has captured the competition. "Harvard would have won almost every year except that we have always picked the wrong three people to represent us," said David B. Mumford, Higgins Professor of Mathematics, yesterday.

Team members attributed the University's dry spell in the contest to Harvard's casual approach. "For Harvard, it's much more of an amateur thing, but at other places it is a professional thing," said Larsen.

He cited the University of Washington in St. Louis. Mo., which won the Putnam for the last two years by selecting their team on the basis of practice tests.

Harvard's team is selected using scores from the previous year's exam.