princeton and harvard

FightTheTide11
Fri, 11 May 2012 21:33:31 +0000

Ah, youpika’s old Princeton-has-bad-math-because-they-don’t-win-Putnam argument. Because Putnam’s the perfect indicator of the strength of a math department.

Consider this: Putnam team placing is done by the sum of the scores of the three students on the school’s team, which must be selected before the test. Carnegie-Mellon and MIT each had three finishers in the top 14 this year, Caltech had two in the top five, but Harvard won despite finishing with only four scorers in the top 81 (behind MIT’s 29, Princeton’s 9, Stanford’s 6, and Carnegie-Mellon’s 5). The hardest part of Putnam isn’t the test; it’s picking the right team ahead of time.

Anyway, Princeton has a first-place finish and five second-place finishes in the past ten years and is fourth all-time in top-five finishes (behind Harvard, MIT, and Caltech).