Harvard > MIT ?

[collegealum314]

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The Putnam is hard enough that the engineering, science, and even physics majors are irrelevant to the outcome of the competition–its very rare anyone other than a straight math major would get in the top 50-60. When you compare the top 5, top 10, top 50 scores on the Putnam, MIT has had more than Harvard since the turn of the century. MIT just chooses its 3-person team poorly. </p>

<p>Thats just because they have far more kids taking it (think about the relative sizes of math kids at Harvard vs MIT). The fact of matter is they have fewer kids winning the thing because they attract fewer of the top math students. Why, I dont know.

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<p>No, you didn’t really read what I said In the past ten years, MIT has had more Putnam winners (top 5) than any other school. We attract top people. The problem is that they aren’t on the official Putnam team, so their performance doesn’t count toward the team score. We also probably have had the most people in the top 10, 20, or 50. </p>

<p>Harvard did used to have more top math people in the 90’s, but that changed in the early 2000’s. There was one really top math kid in the early 2000’s who was very interested in computer science, working in MIT’s media lab. He bucked the trend and went to MIT, and around that time, we started to get all the top people. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence. Maybe we’re too deep now or the top people we have aren’t consistent (maybe due to lack of practice?), but the people we put on the team don’t do as well as some of our other people.</p>