<p>I'm curious - how many people who say that Harvard "is so graduate focused that the undergraduate program gets little funding or attention" actually went to Harvard, or have any real idea what they're talking about? </p>
<p>A lot of program alumni who currently attend Harvard were hanging around RSI this summer, and I didn't hear anything that would support zephyr's assertion.</p>
<p><a href="http://math.stanford.edu/%5B/url%5D">http://math.stanford.edu/</a></p>
<p>How is Harvard's math website any better?</p>
<p>And anecdotal evidence from rickoid types doesn't mean whatever you say is true.,</p>
<p>when you give a school 45k a year, the least it can do is have a decent website... I don't think a website is really an indicator of the quality of a department</p>
<p>I completely agree.</p>
<p>MightyChip, TokenAdult,</p>
<p>Those rankings are actually quite old, sometime around 1993. However, there is no need to quibble with any of the schools in the top 20. It really comes down to fit and focus.</p>
<p>To see what type of studetns some of the schools have see:</p>
<p>Princeton does quite well. A school that was ranked lower in the NRC rankings(34) does quite well in the competition, Duke. I unerstand that those rankings will be updated in a year or 2.</p>
<p>Further, another was to check quality is to count the number of Fields Medals have been produced by a particular school. Princeton and UChicago are at the top of the list. See the following for more:</p>
<p>Does the referenced Web page refer to where Fields medalists received their undergraduate educations, or to where they were faculty members at the time they gained the medal?</p>
<p>The CC'ers have once again digressed quite far from the original topic...eh, who cares.</p>
<p>Orbit_J,</p>
<p>How so, the thread topic is about math at Princeton. Most of the posts are on math with some economics sprinkled in because the OP said that they were also interested in economics.</p>
<p>Toekn_adult,</p>
<p>Good question, I do not know the answer to that. The other side of that question is how many of those Fields Medal winners actually teach undergrads. A point was made earlier about the advanced math being a graduate study subject, true enough. Thier point was that a very good LAC would do as good a job or perhaps a better job of preparing a student for an advanced degree. From my perspective this favors Princeton because of their undergraduate focus.</p>
<p>Eagle does a point. I did mention economics and maths so yeah. Its become a little argument on rankings again. Having said so I am considering UChicago now as a back up option incase I get rejected from Princeton ...</p>
<p>Here on the Princeton Forum over the last year, I have even seen the incredible statement that Princeton is a better place to be an undergrad than Brand X because "it doesn't have a graduate school." Huh? The OP's question is about whether Princeton is a good school at which to study mathematics as an undergrad, and of course the answer to that question is yes. The founders of the Art</a> of Problem Solving online forums are persons who received undergraduate degrees in math from Princeton (at least one was accepted also to Harvard, and turned Harvard down for a rather random reason) and they are the real deal when it comes to advancing the math knowledge of young people. I recommend their site to everyone. </p>
<p>But along the way to some participants here answering the OP's question, there was some topic drift, and there were also the usual specious, unevidenced statements made about certain other schools. The simple fact is that no one can validly draw the inference that just because a school (e.g. MIT or Harvard) has a world-renowned graduate program in mathematics, that it therefore has a poor undergraduate program in mathematics. That's not logical reasoning. While Princeton is a great place to major in mathematics as an undergrad, which is what the OP was asking about, so is Harvard, and so is MIT. Anyone who claims to the contrary hasn't sufficiently investigated what is available to undergraduate students in terms of resources, support, and well-designed classes at those schools. Moreover, students who are in a position to pick and choose, for example alumni of the Math Olympiad Summer Program here in the United States, or International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists from other countries, may indeed choose Princeton for their undergraduate degree, but they often choose the other two schools I mention in this post. Plenty of highly able and math-loving young people find the undergraduate experience at MIT or at Harvard very satisfying, and recommend it to their friends and younger schoolmates.</p>
<p>Princeton does not have professional schools, but it offers graduate programs in virtually every discipline. In fact according to their math department's web site: "There are currently 55 graduate students and 30 undergraduate majors."</p>
<p>The issue of ranking when it comes to the top programs mentioned above is a little silly. What's important is fit for the individual student. That said, HPM all offer a huge array of classes and attract the best math students from all over the word. This is something to consider when choosing a program. These schools all offer great opportunities. However, with all of the undergraduate mathematical superstars you could get lost or ignored if you haven't advanced beyond computational math during high school.</p>
<p>When my S was looking at colleges, he ONLY considered schools that had graduate math programs. They were the only schools that offered the advanced course work that he needed.</p>
<p>"While Princeton is a great place to major in mathematics as an undergrad, which is what the OP was asking about, so is Harvard, and so is MIT."</p>
<p>What school is NOT good for math?</p>
<p>"Does the referenced Web page refer to where Fields medalists received their undergraduate educations, or to where they were faculty members at the time they gained the medal?"</p>
<p>It refers to the institutions at which they were employed at the time they recieved the medal, unless some of them recieved undergrad educations at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study :)</p>
<p>Well, Princeton's math department has a lot of prestige surrounding especially given the fact that Albert Einstein spent his last years at Princeton. Oxford University in England is also very highly regarded in math.</p>
<p>Princeton and Oxford are probably the most highly regarded math departments in the world.</p>
<p>Agreed with tokenadult.</p>
<p>R. Rusczyk (AoPS creator) won USAMO in '89 (correct me if I'm wrong) and he went to Princeton. IMO medalists go to Princeton and some IMO Romanian team people.</p>
<p>The math is amazing at Pinceton. That should answer your question</p>
<p>Second, the debate for best undergraduate math will go on</p>
<p>Albert Einstein was a physicist, not a mathematician. He was also at the IAS, not teaching intro to linear algebra. He was also there decades ago and that says nothing about the program now. </p>
<p>Princeton is only one of the top math departments in the world. You neglect Harvard, for one, and MIT, of course. And Stanford. Do you have any data citations?</p>
<p>What do mathematics competitions have to do with the strength of the department?</p>
<p>Take a look at the front page of <a href="http://www.princeton.edu%5B/url%5D">www.princeton.edu</a> today. The kids winning top prizes from Princeton for last year - several of them are math kids.</p>
<p>I'm sorry if I wasn't being specific enough. What does a math competition have to do with succesful research mathematicians? We can say that a math department is good if it has a good faculty (good research mathematicians) or produces good students (good research mathematicians.) For example, take a look at the list of Putnam fellows <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putnam_exam#Putnam_Fellows%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putnam_exam#Putnam_Fellows</a>
Only a small handful of them went on to become well-known mathematicians. I was reading the biography of Stephen Smale (Fields Medalist) the other day and it said (or something close to) that mathematics competitions that tend to impress everybody tend to rely on speed, techical proficiency, and intuitive insights in that order with little emphasis on the last one. (And the putnam is a pretty good competition too. It tries to emphasize the last aspect, but I am not sure of it's success.) A succesful research mathematician does not need speed, and the emphasis is not on technical proficiency. It is on those intuitive insights which cannot be hardly be taught or practiced unlike those mathematics competitions of which many are so fond.</p>
<p>I disagree with the assesment that the Putnam is based on speed or technical proficiency. It (and more so, the IMO) is almost completely based on "intuitive insights." </p>
<p>The number of well-known mathematicians isn't all that large so that any single competition can claim that it places a good portion of its winners there. If we look at, say, the HMs and up in the Putnam, we might get a lot more famous mathematicians, however.</p>
<p>A lot of difficult math problems are like miniature research projects. A student has, on average, 1.5 hours in a competition to work on a problem. While not a great amount of time, the process to finding a solution is similar to that of solving a research problem.</p>