<p>i think last year's awarding of two was an exception</p>
<p>DD2 just received Axline and Lingle via Fedex.</p>
<p>Dear Jessica,</p>
<p>"It is with great honor to inform you the Freshman Admissions Committee has selected you as a 2007 Dorothy B. and Harrison C. Lingle Scholar."</p>
<p>Yeah, the package is by FedEx, even if you're not international. It's a rather small envelope (so don't be scared).
And the really awesome thing about winning Lingle is my parents promised to buy me a car if I got a full ride to Caltech :D</p>
<p>Congrats to inverse and fizix!</p>
<p>So decisions are moving their way in? Where do you guys live?</p>
<p>Thanks. momofchris.</p>
<p>Mathwiz, we live in Florida. I believe DD got the result today by Fedex because she is an EA admit. For RD students, it may be later via first class mail. I wish you also get in.</p>
<p>Congrats Inverse & Fizit
Its terrific just to get in, and the awards make it even sweeter!</p>
<p>good luck to everyone else</p>
<p>We're very happy that son received admission letter+Axline today. He has done well in various science competitions (exams, not research) but he plans to be a math major, and had been leaning towards MIT before this news. (He has also applied to Harvard and Princeton but hasn't heard from them yet.) Now we are very keen on learning more about math at Caltech. Of course going to prefrosh weekend is one way, but that's a ways away, and it is also at the same time as the Harvard weekend. So I'm wondering how best to gather information now?</p>
<p>Congratulations all!</p>
<p>If you want to learn more about math at Caltech, you could always ask people on this forum. I'm always happy to talk about math, and I'm sure there exist other math majors on this forum with the same property.</p>
<p>OK, some math questions- bearing in mind that I'm not quite sure what the best questions are, this is just stuff that comes to mind...</p>
<p>Which fields of math is Caltech relatively strong in? and where is it relatively weak?</p>
<p>How many students each year go on to math grad school? How many take the Putnam? (MIT likes to boast about its high participation and sucess there.)</p>
<p>I found a webpage for the Caltech math club but it was out of date; what sorts of activities are there? are there regular undergraduate seminars, discusison groups, etc?</p>
<p>How relevant is it that Caltech isn't considered one of the very best grad math programs? (I gather these are Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and U Chicago, right?)</p>
<p>The different campus vibes may well be more important, but even harder to get info about over the net; this something my son will just have to work out for himself. (We have already visited both campuses, so he has something to go on; prefrosh weekends could help more with that.)</p>
<p>Could you post your son's stats, competition awards, so that i can have an idea if my D. will have a chance next year? Thanks.</p>
<p>I should warn you that I'm only a freshman, so don't trust me too much.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Which fields of math is Caltech relatively strong in? and where is it relatively weak?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>According to a publication by the American Mathematical Society, of the seven PhDs awarded in the last three years, three are classified as "Algebra or Number Theory", three are "Discrete Mathematics or Combinatorics" and one is "Geometry or Topology." That's (maybe) a rough distribution of Caltech's strengths.</p>
<p>
[quote]
How many students each year go on to math grad school? How many take the Putnam? (MIT likes to boast about its high participation and sucess there.)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I'm not entirely sure on the number. There's a four unit class that prepares for the Putnam.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I found a webpage for the Caltech math club but it was out of date; what sorts of activities are there? are there regular undergraduate seminars, discusison groups, etc?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So far this year, the math club hasn't done much. Maybe they've done more in previous years. If there are regular undergraduate seminars, etc, then I don't know about them. </p>
<p>
[quote]
How relevant is it that Caltech isn't considered one of the very best grad math programs? (I gather these are Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and U Chicago, right?)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It depends. If you're going to use your math degree to go into econ or finance or theoretical physics, I can't imagine that being relevant. </p>
<p>If you're going into theoretical math, then you'll probably take graduate classes while being an undergraduate. In that case it'll probably me more relevant. </p>
<p>And yes, if I had to name the top six graduate math programs, I would name those.</p>
<p>"Which fields of math is Caltech relatively strong in? and where is it relatively weak?"
This is a hard question to answer since the math department tends to be very young and have high turnover rate- in the last 3 years three full ptofessors (all 35 or younger) left caltech with another one leaving this year, but at the same time 6 people were hired in the last 2 years. Thats a lot for a math department of only 16 professors, since in a department this small theres often only 1 prof working in a given field. We do at the moment have people who are or have been THE top person in their fields in mathematical physics/functional analysis (Barry Simon), representations of big groups (Alexei Borodin), set theory, esp. applications to analysis (Alekos Kechris), finite group theory (Michae Aschbacher), mathematical optimization/signal processing (Emmanuel Candes of ACM), geometric mechanics (Jerrold Marsden in CDS) and I'm probably missing some string theory and PDE people. There are also established top notch people in low dimensional topology (Danni Calegari, Benson Farb), finite combinatorics (Richard Wilson), smooth dynamical systems (Amie Wilkinson), algebraic number theory (Flach, Ramakrishnan) and some young associate proffesors who will likely become more famous in the few years to come. Among recent (last 10 years) Ph.D graduates of the department the most prominent I can think of tend to be in mathematical physics and in set theory but thats probably because I'm more familiar with the literature in those areas. </p>
<p>"How many students each year go on to math grad school? How many take the Putnam? (MIT likes to boast about its high participation and sucess there.)"
Out of the class of 2006 I can name off the top of my head 7 people in math grad school (5 of them at top programs) and 5 more math majors in grad school for theoretical physics, theoretical CS, theoretical chemistry, and economics. There are probably others. (there were only 19 math majors in that graduating class).
Most top math majors don't take the putnam-especially as upperclassmen-but caltech still manages to finish in the top 6 most years. </p>
<p>"I found a webpage for the Caltech math club but it was out of date; what sorts of activities are there? are there regular undergraduate seminars, discusison groups, etc? "
Theres a "tips on applying for grad school" session each year but other thann that the math club in recent years has been mostly a liason between students and finance companies. There are no specific regular undergraduate seminars but undergrads are welcome (and many do) attend the real seminars. In addition to the weekly mathematics colloquium, there are weekly seminars in mathematical physics, logic, geometry and topology, number theory, and less regularly in other fields.</p>
<p>"How relevant is it that Caltech isn't considered one of the very best grad math programs? (I gather these are Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and U Chicago, right?)"
For all (not much) that it matters, in the latest rankings Caltech is 7th below the above six schools and together with Courant, Yale and Michigan.The lower ranking is largely due to small department size and high turnover rate mentioned above. At the same time most professors would advise prospective grad students (in relevant fields of math) to go to Caltech (or Courant) over Berkeley since the professors at berkeley lately tend to retire, leave to other schools for higher pay, or remain employed by berkeley while physically staying there only for 3 months a year (spring at berkeley-summer at moscow-fall at IHES types), making it hard for grad students without prior arrangements to find an advisor and resulting in many taking 10+ years to complete their Ph.D. The small department size and turnover rate is sometimes an issue for grad students looking for advisors in their fields of interest, but isn't really relevant for undergrads since almost noone knows (nor should know) what field they want to go into upon entering college, and those that do tend to change their minds. Running out of classes is a common concern for mathematically advanced frosh but is never an issue in practice- there are enough graduate math/ACM classes offered each year to overload each term and still not have taken even most of the classes you wanted.
BTW, every math major has to take graduate classes to graduate- there are not nearly enough undergraduate classes to satisfy graduation requirements.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the info! Harvard math is pretty small too, 19 full professors plus lots of non-tenure-track assistants; the MIT and Princeton math departments are much larger. Have any of you heard explanations for why there's been so much turnover in Caltech math? This usually isn't a good sign, is it likely to continue?</p>
<p>Hmmm... since I got into UChicago and was told that I'd probably get into their Honors Analysis course my freshman year, maybe I should consider that over Caltech. Especially since I'm a math major...</p>
<p>It really doesn't look that great for the math department at Caltech, to be honest.</p>
<p>Aedar,
I think the turnover rate in the math department at Caltech, and the resulting youth of the department makes for a healthier situation than the one at say Yale or Cornell where the median age of a tenured professor is almost 60. Basically, the "tenure-track" in the caltech math department is a formality in the opposite way than it is at Princeton- at Princeton its almost implicit that an assistant professor won't get tenured, and the new full professors are typically older people hired from elsewhere. Caltech's math departments typically hires young people for whom this is the first tenure track post, and almost always gives them tenure right away- as a result 7 of the 16 professors currently in the department are under 35 years old. Since younger people have more reasons to move than older ones- a higher turnover rate results (at least two, potentially 3 of the 4 math faculty who left caltech in the last 3 years or are in the process of doing so are doing it for "2-body problem" reasons). </p>
<p>Phuriku- I'm sure neapols1 can give you a good comparison between the caltech and uchicago math departments, since he has taken lots of math classes at Chicago, including the honors analysis class, before coming to caltech. But I think the quality of top math major <em>undergraduates</em> tends to be better at Caltech than at Chicago. Moreover, the extensive (and non P/F-able!) humanities requirements at Chicago will make it hard to take more than 2 math classes at a time- while math majors at Caltech regularly take 4 math classes per trimester (obviously you can't make a <em>bad</em> decision mathwise by going to Chicago-just something to consider).</p>
<p>BTW, I was also choosing between Caltech and Chicago 3 years ago and chose Caltech largely because its as far from Indiana as I can be in the continental US.</p>
<p>I agree that having a disportionate share of very old faculty can be a problem.
But with rapid turnover I worry that people might find it easier to cut corners on things that are less visible to the outside world, like teaching and contact with students; it's also harder to make connections with a thesis advisor if the staff is in a lot of flux. The unsustainable ideal would be to have a faculty that stays in place w/o aging; or a faculty that is growing fast enough that the fraction of younger and more active tenured people stays high.</p>
<p>More seriously, "two-body problems" are increasingly common; how does Caltech tend to do with people in that situation? Ie how many of the right sort of jobs are reasonably close? Also, where did the tenured faculty who left move to?</p>
<p>so if i have received my admission letter but not a scholarship letter, is it safe to assume that i will not be getting one?</p>
<p>Of the tenured faculty who left in the last three years, one went to Uchicago, one to Brown, and one to Penn State. I'm not sure whether Caltech has a formalized policy in dealing with two-body problems-but it played a role in hiring this year as the math department had to hire Amie Wilkinson and Benson Farb (previously full professors at Northwestern and Uchicago respectively) together or hire neither of them-and ended up hiring both. Obviously as a place that specializes in a relatively small number of fields, Caltech (the institute as a whole, not the math department specifically) typically loses out in 2-body problem situations to larger schools in cases when someone they want to hire has an S.O. in academia in a different field. </p>
<p>As far as effect of the rapid turnover rate on students- I've found the quality of teaching in the math department here pretty good (at least better than at my high school) and independent of how old the instructor is or how long (s)he has been at caltech-professors don't seem to teach better with experience. The turnover rate affects grad students (one student had to be picked up by Terrance Tao when his advisor left to Chicago), but getting a math SURF as an undergrad is easy enough not to worry about it.</p>
<p>There are FAR worse things than getting Terrence Tao as your grad adviser!!!</p>