How good is the MIT math department?

MIT consistently ranks in the top six graduate programs in the country. (The others are Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.) In 2006, the U. S. News and World Report ranked MIT first and four of the others tied for second.

This excellence at the graduate level is matched by excellence at the undergraduate level, as reflected in many objective measures. The major intercollegiate mathematics competition is the Putnam Examination. Roughly 100 of the nearly 4000 students who take this challenging test each December are MIT students, mostly math majors. MIT always places near the top. It placed first in 2003 and 2004, and while it did not win the 2005 competition it dominated the field: 23 of the top 75 competitors, and three of the top five, were MIT math majors. We also took top honors in last year's COMAP Applied Mathematics competition. MIT undergraduates won the prestigious Morgan Prize for best undergraduate research in 2005 and in 2006.

The MIT Mathematics Department is unusual in the US in that it encompasses both theoretical and applied mathematics, and that applied mathematics houses very strong theoretical computer science and combinatorics components.