Impressive Facts
AMS Award
In 2005, our department was awarded the very first Award for Exemplary Program by the American Mathematical Society for the strength of our overall program.
Read the April, 2006, article in the Notices of the AMS.
We Do Well in Preparing Our Students for Graduate School
- In recent years about 60% of our math majors go on to Ph.D. programs, surely the highest of any college or university in the nation.
- Almost all of these students received full tuition scholarships and received additional financial support through research and/or teaching fellowships.
- In the past five years, our graduating seniors have been accepted to graduate schools in mathematics, applied mathematics, computer science, physics, and economics at Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Wisconsin, U. Penn, Brown, Caltech, just to name a few.
- One reason for our success is that we give every math major a research experience.
We Also Do Well Placing Our Students in Nonacademic Jobs
- Recent math majors have gone on to jobs at Google, consulting, finance, software engineering, high-school teaching, actuarial science, policy analysis, and many other interesting careers.
Our Students Do Well in Fellowship Competitions
- For instance, in 2003, four Mudd math seniors (of about 17 going to graduate school) won prestigious NSF fellowships for graduate study ($28,000 per year for three years)!
- In recent years we have had as many as 5 math seniors win these fellowships in one year!
- In 2004 and 2005, our math majors have won Watson Fellowships for travel and study abroad after graduation.
- In 2000, we had both a Rhodes Scholar and a Churchill Scholar among our senior majors.
We Give Our Students Real Research Experiences
- Every math major has a research experience before they graduate, in the form of a Senior Thesis (research in a faculty member's area) or a Clinic (industry-sponsored project).
- Several faculty have jointly authored papers with students (more than 20 papers in the last three years).
- Many of our students have also independently authored papers.
- A Mudd math major, Joshua Greene, won the AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize (given to one undergraduate in the nation for outstanding research) in 2002. Another Mudd math major, Aaron Archer won an Honorable Mention in this competition in 1998.
Our Students Have Fun with (and Do Well in) Mathematical Competitions!
- In the 2003 Putnam Mathematical Competition, our HMC team placed 5th nationwide! HMC is the only undergraduate college in the last 30 years to have done so (and we've done it twice, placing third in 1991). We also placed in the Top 10 in 2002 and 2001.
- In 2000, on the nationwide Putnam Mathematical Competition, Harvey Mudd College outperformed nearly all other schools in participation and numbers of top-100 finishers.
- An amazing seven Mudders placed in the top 100 (out of over 3000 students who compete), and only two other universities could claim as many. (When adjusted for school size, HMC outperformed all other schools.) Moreover, 84 Mudders competed, the highest participation in the nation. Note that HMC only has 700 students!
- HMC leads all other colleges and universities in the number of ICM and MCM (Interdisciplinary and Mathematical Competition in Modeling) Outstanding awards won. Each year the MCM awards Outstanding to the top 10–12 papers from over 600 entries. In 2004, HMC teams won three Outstanding Awards!
- No other school had ever done this. The same teams also won special recognition from SIAM and INFORMS for their solutions. HMC also had three teams earn Outstanding Awards in 1999.
- A team of three HMC math and math/CS majors won the 1997 International ACM Programming contest, topping more than 1000 schools worldwide, and the first undergraduate institution ever to win in the competition's 50-year history.
Our Faculty Are Outstanding, and Are Dedicated to Our Students
- Our regular faculty hold Ph.D.'s from some of the best programs in their research areas.
- Nearly all our faculty have won teaching awards at their previous institutions, and some have won national awards.
- Many of our faculty have won NSF Research Awards.
Other Interesting Facts about Math at Mudd
- A Mudd math major won College Jeopardy in 1998, which helped to fund the RIF Mathematics scholarship.
- Many of our students present their research work at national meetings.
- Many of our majors study abroad.
- The median SAT Math score of entering freshmen at HMC is 770.
- The least advanced course we teach is an accelerated calculus course.
- We offer graduate-level courses in conjunction with CGU and the other Claremont Colleges, so you will not run out of courses.
- We are the only undergraduate institution in the IPAM consortium, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (headquartered at UCLA) which is one of three mathematical institutes in the U.S. funded by the NSF.
