Carlton or Reed for a student who wants to study pure math?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looking to build a good college list and would love some advice: My DC wants to study pure math, and by the time he graduates high school, would have completed Calc IV (multivariable calculus) and Linear Algebra. Both classes were fairly easy for him.

Would either Carlton or Reed be a good school for him to continue study math, mainly:
- are math classes there challenging?
- will he "run out of" higher level math classes during his undergrad years?
- will he find a good "math kid" crowd at either school?
- other things he should be aware?

He'll likely go on to get a masters or PhD in math.

He has other schools on his list (e.g. Umich, Wisconsin, etc), and his counselor suggested these two, and we're not familiar with either.

It depends on how pure he wants to be. Most high school students don't realize that most of what they think of as math is applied math, not pure math.

Reed, for example has a math & statistics department that doesn't have the "grad-level" courses that would be junior/senior courses at an MIT or a Harvard.

But it offers several CS theory and Statistics courses.

If he really wants to go hard-line advanced pure math through grad school, not applied or mixed with science in the more liberal arts tradition, he's better off at a big state university where he can dip into grad courses, or, more realistically, a T10 school.

The small liberal arts colleges are a great foundation for grad school, but they absolutely are not accelerated, as haven't adapted to the modern (past 20 years) trend of doing calc (1-4) and linear algebra courses (plus after school math clubs/courses for deeply enticed algebra, geometry, and discrete math and proofs) in high school

https://www.reed.edu/math-stats/courses.html

There’s nothing to adapt to…you skip calc 1-4 if you can pass the placement test, same for linear algebra. What tends to happen at DD’s lac (Pomona) is students come in having taken a very basic, linear algebra course and then get near 0s on the 1-on-1 placement exams with professors for higher level courses, because the first year first semester linear algebra course is entirely proof based and some years introduces Jordan Canonical forms and markov/stochastic processes that would not be typically introduced in a high school course.

Reed is actually a great example, because very few can place past Intro Analysis there. You can do advanced coursework early, but you’re going to actually need a rigorous proof background.

There literally aren't enough courses in the catalog unless you branch out to the applied fields.

If you want a job, you’ll take a few applied courses. There’s also not a real divide between pure and applied- this is a massive split that’s generated by people who aren’t in mathematics.

While it's true that most applied mathematicians do tons of proofs with very abstract and technical papers, at the undergrad level the applied math courses are indeed quite different from the pure math courses: namely, the lack of proofs.

Compare Evans PDE book (proof based, used in applied math grad programs) with any typical undergrad PDE book and you'll see a marked difference: the latter still feels a bit like a plug-and-chug calc1/2/3 cookbook

[Anonymous]

Paris-Saclay University: Ranked 1st in the world for Mathematics and highly regarded for mathematical finance, working with institutions like Polytechnique and CentraleSupélec