<p>I feel like long ago, I haven't even heard of MIT.. now I know it as a very top tier college. Interestingly enough, if you look at Putnam results, MIT has only started "dominating" it beginning about ten years ago (by the way if you think it doesn't after looking at team results, be aware that MIT sucks at picking the students to be placed on its official team, but its students nonetheless dominate it as individuals). Around when did MIT begin becoming a top school?</p>
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<p>The year it was founded: 1861</p>
<p>Um, I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, MIT has always been prestigious, and has always done well on the Putnam. You could claim that in the past 10 years, a huge proportion of those who do well on math contests etc. have come to MIT compared to other colleges, but I don’t know how true this is, and even if it was, it probably doesn’t add much to any prestige of MIT.</p>
<p>You’re 21 years old. “Long ago” you were too young to have heard of MIT. Unless they have famous sports teams, kids don’t know most colleges.</p>
<p>Also, with the advent of the Iron Man movies, MIT became popular in terms of “The School Tony Stark Attended”. Also, the fact that Gordon Freeman(From HL2) received his PhD from MIT with his doctoral thesis on “Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array” has also popularized MIT.</p>
<p>In the end, MIT has always been prestigious, but the recent media attention has helped as well.</p>
<p>They have been top 5 in the Putnam consistently since the Putnam contest started in the 30’s. (The first Putnam fellow was Richard Feynman '39.) Probably only Harvard has had better results overall. However, I think the OP is correct in that are recruitment of Americans has gotten stronger in the past 10 years. In the early 2000’s, there was a kid who had been working in the MIT computer science department since he was like 10. He was also awesome at math, the top in the U.S. When he chose MIT, it seemed like it was more en vogue for the top U.S. math team people to go to MIT.</p>
<p>As for overall prestige, MIT has been the number 1 engineering school forever. It is top 5 in <em>every</em> technical field. It was founded in 1861, and by the first decade of the 1900’s Harvard felt it was lagging behind MIT in the sciences and tried to acquire it unsuccessfully. Instead, they completely revamped their programs. MIT has been well-known for a long time, but I’ve heard it’s prestige increased when MIT labs developed radar in World War II. </p>
<p>So, overall no. MIT has been MIT for a long time. In terms of Math team, yes it has gone from #2 to #1 in the past 10 years.</p>