<p>I want to study Mathematics, and I was just wondering what colleges have some of the top undergraduate programs for math?</p>
<p>Princeton comes to mind immediately.</p>
<p>Princeton, Harvard, MIT, UChicago, UC Berkeley and Stanford are the best programs in no particular order.</p>
<p>sorry for hijacking, but does that mean it's really hard to get into those schools if you want to major in math?</p>
<p>No. Well, it is really hard to get into any of those schools regardless of what you want to major in, they are all extremely selective.
However, your potential major does not play a role in your admission. Math is a subject that would be found within the College of Arts and Sciences of each of those Universities, and while a student may assert that they plan to follow a certain major when they apply, many of these schools do not have you officially declare a major until the end of sophomore year. The school anticipates that most students have multiple interests, and will likely change majors.</p>
<p>There are many, many places to study math. Being a math major hardly requires you to study at the handful of programs with the top graduate faculty. </p>
<p>There may also be disadvantages to those places. Harvard and MIT, particularly, tend to attract the lion's share of IMO medalists, and have math programs designed for people that far off the scale in math ability. Many such students have largely completed a standard undergrad curriculum by the time they hit campus. This is fine if you plan to end up tenured in math at Caltech, but I am not sure what it means for a normal human majoring in math at such places.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is fine, and they teach math for regular people as well, but in such an environment, I would worry that the geniuses would attract all the faculty attention and accolades.</p>
<p>Of course, if you have a gold medal, or publications in math as a high school student, then that would be a reason to go to one of these places.</p>
<p>I've heard St Olaf is very good for math among LACs.</p>
<p>LACs for math from Rugg's:
Bates
Bowdoin
Bucknell
Carleton
Colgate
Dartmouth
Davidson
Dickinson
Harvey Mudd
Holy Cross
Kenyon
Mount Holyoke
Occidental
Pomona
Rice
St Mary's (MD)
St Olaf
Trinity (CT)
Union
Wabash
Wellesley
Wheaton
Whitman
Willamette</p>
<p>Gourman Report ranking for undergrad math:
Princeton
UC Berkeley
Harvard
MIT
U Chicago
Stanford
NYU
Yale
Wisconsin Madison
Columbia
Michigan Ann Arbor
Brown
Cornell
UCLA
Illinois Urbana Champaign
Caltech
Minnesota
U Penn
Notre Dame
Georgia Tech
U washington
Purdue WL
Rutgers NB
Indiana U Bloomington
U Maryland College Park
Rice
UC San Diego
Northwestern
Texas Austin
carnegie Mellon
Johns Hopkins
Washington U St Louis
Ohio State
SUNY Stony Brook
Penn State
UVA
RPI
Illinois Chicago
U Colorado Boulder
U Kentucky
UNC Chapel Hill
Dartmouth
U Rochester
U Utah
SUNY Buffalo
Tulane
USC
UC Santa Barbara
U Massachusetts AMherst
U Oregon
Duke
Louisiana State Baton Rouge
U Arizona
case Western
Michigan State
U Pittsburgh
Brandeis
US Air Force Academy</p>
<p>Brown University for Applied Math. No questions.</p>
<p>Rugg's is pretty worthless if it excludes Williams. Williams is the top LAC for math and arguably provides the top undergrad math education, period. Many of the faculty have won a variety national distinguished teaching awards, and the math alumni go on to top notch graduate programs. For more:</p>
<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=375741%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=375741</a>
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=381124%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=381124</a></p>
<p>Thanks for all the answers</p>
<p>Just some more info:</p>
<p>I plan on going the pre-med route, but I love math, and I want that to be my major, and I would prefer to be in a strong program.</p>
<p>The colleges that I am most interested in now are:
University of Michigan
Michigan State
Notre Dame
Northwestern
University of Chicago
Washington University in St. Louis
Dartmouth
Johns Hopkins
Princeton
Yale</p>
<p>That looks like a good list of schools... PM me if you have any questions specific to Chicago.</p>
<p>Chicago is definitely one of the best.</p>
<p>Just a warning though, like everything else at Chicago, UC math is weird. ;)</p>
<p>I have personal experience with this, as I grew up with UC math ( <a href="http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/%5B/url%5D">http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/</a> ). A lot of the new ideas and formulas are intriguing and cool, but it's not quite as traditional as some other math curriculums.</p>
<p>I'd say the big three (no particular order) are MIT, Princeton, and Harvard. The first is best with applied math, while the last two have exceptional theoretical math.</p>
<p>Yah, but Chicago undergrads don't use UCSMP. :-P</p>
<p>Princeton is tops in mathematics........hands down.</p>
<p>I'm going to be a math major at Rice. I recall looking at the Putnum math competition scores from previous years as a rough guide. Schools that appeared on there multiple times included Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Caltech, Chicago, Michigan State, Michigan, Rice, WashU St. Louis, some ones in Canada (I think Waterloo, UToronto), and some others that I don't remember probably. Suprisingly, not as many Columbias, Browns, Dartmouths, and Penns as I might have thought. You should run a google search for it if you're interested.</p>
<p>For undergraduate mathematics in the US, I'd suggest Harvard, MIT, or Princeton. If you want to go overseas, the best schools for math are the University of Cambridge in England and the </p>
<p>Mathematics, along with English, is quite possibly the most traditional college major. As such, EVERY major university and respectable LAC is going to have a well established Math department. From what I have seen, the following schools have the best departments:</p>
<p>Brown University (particularly Applied Mathematics)
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Cornell University
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New York University (particularly Applied Mathematics)
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of California-Berkeley
University of California-Los Angeles
University of Chicago
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Yale University</p>
<p>But like I said, the rest of the Ivies (Dartmouth and Penn), other respected universities (such as Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice etc...), major state schools (like Georgia Tech, Michigan State, Penn State, UT-Austin, Wisconsin etc...) and most good LACs will have good Mathematics departments.</p>
<p>According to the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, here are the top 10 departments in :</p>
<p>1) Applied Math.</p>
<p>2) Pure Math.</p>
<p>3) Statistics.</p>
<p>Source: Chronicle of Higher Education</p>
<p>I must admit I was surprised to see MIT didn't make to any of the top 10 list and Harvard only made to the top 10 Statistics list.</p>