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<p>Chicago’s math undergrad program has, similar to Harvard’s Math 55, the sequence Honors Analysis tested into by talented undergrads, and the program is a hotspot for people who eventually want to get a math PhD at a top notch university. It does not attract the culture of taking the Putnam, indeed. Perhaps you mean to suggest that someone with IMO/IPhO tendencies is likely to take part in the Putnam, although I’m not sure if that’s true, as there seem to have been exceptional performers on such competitions who don’t do very much competition math later on. </p>
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<p>On the undergraduate level, I don’t think there’s much of a “level.” I find the talent is pretty scattered, aside from the fact that schools like Harvard invariably grab a lot of those who compete most successfully in the olympiads. But I doubt the admissions offices necessarily discern for subtle field-specific talent to the extent that they grab all the best students. After all, perhaps that’s not even the point of their job the way they and many others see it.</p>
<p>As evidence for this, I’ve found great mathematicians hail from random undergraduate schools but uniformly ending up at the best rated graduate schools which are a long shot even for many students from those excellent undergraduate schools (though not all).</p>
<p>Anyway, the real point I was making by bringing in the graduate departments is that likely that’s what those who hype up Cal’s academics are actually talking about - ultimately, graduate departments and undergraduates are…departments, and essentially the same. So the reason your experience may differ from that of someone whose foreign acquaintances seem to hype the school up is that they’re not taking into account that Berkeley is chained to accepting mostly Californians. Which means that sakky’s argument of “let’s grab them” actually would work because a lot of internationals have terrific respect for the academics at Berkeley. The individual you spoke of who was looking at Stanford, MIT, Harvard probably was going purely from the perspective of American university selectivity, whilst this does not (in my experience) constitute something many international students are aware of.</p>
<p>Perhaps in the IMO camps, it’s just common to aim for Harvard and take Math 55. But it depends who you talk to. In the large crowd who wants to train as engineers, usually among internationals, the 3 schools mentioned alongside each other are Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.</p>