<p>sakky, as usual you and I are arguing over nothing. I agree with you that Not quite old was probably reaching when he said that Caltech had even fewer undergrads before the war. Everyone did. So that doesn’t make Caltech special.</p>
<p>What does make Caltech special is that it still has, over history, proportionally more Nobels than anybody else. It seems odd to change the count by counting from a more recent date to equalize matters in favor of older schools. If anything, we should ignore Nobels by won other schools before Caltech existed, which I don’t do in my comparisons.</p>
<p>Still, I do care about the present. Which is why I point out that Caltech <em>today</em> has more Nobel faculty, pound for pound, than any competitor. And my point in all of this wasn’t some sort of abstract quality comparison, but merely the observation that undergraduates, if they want to learn from/work with Nobelists, have the best chance at Caltech, since there are way more Nobelists per student here than anywhere.</p>