<p>Here is how other people think about MIT</p>
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<p>I think it's misleading to look at just a single year. Looking through the list of Putnam fellows on the Wikipedia site, Harvard simply has had many, many more Putnam fellows than MIT. Sorry, but there's no way getting around that Harvard has dominated the Putnam for most of the past 30 years. And the Putnam isn't about which school has more people interested in math or which school has more "very good" people. It's about which school has the very very best. The difference between the #1 scorer on the Putnam and the #10 scorer can be huge. Remember, the median score on the Putnam is zero, and you only need to get a couple of problems right to be in the top 10. The #1 guy, though, often gets everything right. And it's the #1 guy who often stays on as a Harvard math professor, not the honorable mention guy.</p>
<p>MIT can certainly claim to be more "math literate" than Harvard. Its students probably have a slightly higher average math SAT than Harvard (although much lower verbal SAT than Harvard). It has several times more math majors than Harvard, and has several times more Putnam takers than Harvard, and probably more higher scorers at lower levels. MIT students can take pride in their "Integration Bee Competitions" (apparently they hold a competition to see who can do integrals faster) and other geeky rituals while their counterparts at Harvard (even the math majors) experience the true meaning of a liberal arts education, choose from hundreds of exciting extracurricular activities, and prepare to be their masters in the real world. While MIT excels at producing "math literate" engineers and other math students of modest talent, when it comes to producing world-class mathematicians, MIT is unfortunately a notch below Harvard. </p>
<p>Harvard has tended to stay away from engineering in the past probably because it looked down on it and because there was this little school next to it called MIT that could do the dirty work. But Harvard has always been a powerhouse in science and outranks MIT there. Harvard has many more National Academy of Sciences members (roughly 170 to 100), more Nobel Prize winners, larger research grant income ($2 billion a year), many more top notch papers in leading journals such as Science and Nature (do a PubMed search for Nature and Science), higher citation indices, all spite of not being "as science/technology veered as MIT". According to the Shanghai ranking of world universities, which is purely based on objective criteria, not surveys, MIT received a score of 66 on publication in Nature and Science (Harvard being 100), 73 on Nobel-Prize winning alumni (Harvard 100), 80 on Nobel Prize winning faculty (Harvard 100), 67 on highly cited researchers (Harvard 100), and 62 on Science Citation Index (Harvard 100). The #1 university in science is Harvard, not MIT, despite MIT being "dedicated to science and technology". Only an idiot would say something like "MIT is superior to Harvard in Math and Science".</p>
<p>homebuddy, you didn't really get into Harvard, did you?</p>
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