<p>Please rate these colleges for undergraduate math from best to worst: Case Western Reserve University, Penn State University Park, University of Texas at Austin and University of Rochester.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’s studied Math at more than one of these universities, so they wouldn’t have any way to rank them. Most of the rankings that you’ll find online will be based on faculty scholarly production, which won’t be terribly relevant to your experience in undergraduate courses. These are all among the best universities in the U.S. and I wouldn’t think that they’d attain that status with glaring deficiencies in their Math departments.</p>
<p>I think Rochester stands above the other 4 in that they offer a nice intense 2-yr theoretical honors calculus sequence for math majors. These sequences really accelerate the math major. </p>
<p>There are many other schools (Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State) that offer similar opportunities to their best students. Texas, Penn State and Case Western don’t offer these options. I was actually surprised not to see one at Texas, but it’s not there. </p>
<p>I don’t think these are glaring deficiencies, but if you can go to a school that offers the theoretical sequence from the get go, I think its much better for math majors.</p>
<p>ClassicRockerDad - so, how do I figure out if a college my son is considering has a sequence similar to U of R’s 2-yr Honors Calc? My oldest son is a freshman math major at U of R now, and he is loving his 171Q Calc class. I have a H.S. junior now (who wants to be a pure math major) who is starting to look at schools, and we’ve created a spreadsheet that shows what math classes are required for pure math majors. I haven’t found one yet that describes a similar approach. They may have similar courses, but they don’t say so on their website.</p>
<p>Do you know of any other schools that offer this type of approach? You listed some, but OOS tuition can be tough. We’re in Indiana, so we need to look into the math departments at both Purdue and IU. We’re also considering Univ of Alabama, because he will most likely be an NMF, and free tuition/board sound pretty good! But he’d really like a smallish school (2,000-5,000 would be great!). He’ll apply to U of Roch, and I think he’d be accepted, but affording it will be a big unknown until all the decisions are in April 1.</p>
<p>Basically, I know that Spivak and Apostol (also Courant) are two texts that are really designed for these type of courses. I would look on the colleges catalog for something that appears to be either Honors Calculus, or Calculus with Theory or Elementary Analysis or something like that which expect a student who already has AP Calculus credit. For example for Ohio State (I happen to know a mathematician who did his undergraduate there), you can look up in the catalog for Math191H and see that they use Spivak and that this is part of a 3 course sequence that replaces 5 courses at the non-honors level. Now I know that it’s really hard to get into Math191H, I think you have to be invited, but if you are, it seems great. I know Spivak is also used for Honors Calculus at University of Chicago. </p>
<p>For Indiana, I looked on their website and it seems like S212 is the course they expect for math majors, and if I Google </p>
<p>site:indiana.edu S212, </p>
<p>I come up with
[Math</a> S212 3575](<a href=“http://mlarsen.math.indiana.edu/~larsen/S212/info.html]Math”>http://mlarsen.math.indiana.edu/~larsen/S212/info.html)</p>
<p>where you can see that they use Stewart, the same text my D used for AP Calculus BC. This isn’t it :-(</p>
<p>Here’s another thing I tried Googleing</p>
<p>Spivak honors Calculus -manifolds</p>
<p>This turns up a lot of courses at a lot of schools that use this text. Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, SUNY Stony Brook, even Queens College (CUNY), Colby, Oregon, etc.</p>
<p>Some of these are what you want. You can do the same thing replacing Spivak with Apostol. </p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>Check out Williams for math. I don’t know a ton about the program, but the profs are well regarded and the math majors I know love it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. I will follow your suggestions and look into this more specifically. We will dig through what we can and then my son can email profs and math departments if he wants to get more details.</p>
<p>I’m in the same boat trying to figure out what colleges are best for a math major.</p>
<p>One possible way to evaluate math departments is to look at the Putnam rankings.
[William</a> Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia”>William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia)</p>