Some observations and thoughts on this.
First off, this info is IMHO not very relevant for the vast majority of those interested in majoring in math. My guess is that if you are strong in math but not insanely strong and go to one of the places at the top, then you will be unlikely to major in math because you’ll have bad grades given your competition. Of course, that just means you major in something else not that you drop out of school, of course.
However, the tables shows changes in math talent aggregation over time, i.e. where is the extreme math talent going. The fraction of these awards received by MIT has steadily increased from ca 17% in 2000-1996 to 40% in 2015-2011. Harvard used to take the majority of the individual awards and more than MIT. Now MIT takes 4 times(!) as many awards as Harvard. This is partly due to a 3-fold increase in the number of individual awards taken by MIT but also due to a decline in the number of awards taken by Harvard. This during a period when the total # of individual awards has increased from 280 to 419 (50%).
From 2000-1996 to 2015-2011, the top 10 changed as follows
These increased:
MIT up 240%
Princeton up 60%
Stanford up 255%
Carnegie Mellon up Inf (was 0 in 2000-1996 and 28 in 2015-2011)
Harvey Mudd up 150%
Yale up 175%
These decreased:
Harvard down 28%
CalTech down 40%
University of Waterloo down 61%
Duke down 80%
University of Toronto down 55%
Univ of Chicago down 77%
This test measure extreme math talent of a very specific type, and 80% of the awards go to 10 schools even though over 500 schools participate. So it looks to me that MIT is attracting more of the type of math talent that does well on Putnam than they did 20 years ago. Obviously they are also supporting and training that talent.
More comments:
I wonder what happened at Carnegie-Mellon. That’s a huge jump from 0 individuals awards in 2000-1996 to 28 in 2015-2011.
I would not have guessed that Univ of British Columbia has about the same # of individual awards as Univ of Michigan, Univ of Pittsburgh, Washington University, UC Berkeley, and Yale.