142 on the first test and 138 on the next... maybe you're losing about 4 points per day! -- hey, what was the date of that first test??
FF, Did you win or placed in the Putnam exam? Before you go bashing MIT, at least MIT and Harvard have students who constantly ranked high or even won in the Putnam exams(the hardest math competition in the world)? I rarely see NYU in the top 5 ranked Putnam winners. As to the applied math program that combines both math and computer science, MIT has a good combo program ran by Prof Tom Leighton. He was one of my advisors(I had several cuz of multiple majors). He also help founded Akamai. And the Theory of Computation group has Rivest of RSA. Parrallel algorithms and computtation group has Nancy Lynch. These are all clear giants and leaders in applied math in computation. Of course, Harvard has ton of good applied math people but better pure math people. Persi Diaconis, who now left for Stanford, but for the longest time taught at Harvard. As an interesting side-note to all ET members and an inspiration, Diaconis NEVER had formal education in math until his 20s. He was like travelling MAGICIAN doing his magic tricks throughout his teens. Then in his mid 20s, he decided to study mathematics at SUNY. So, it's NEVER too late to learn if you desire so! And later on, became a renown math profesor at Harvard. In fact, SUNY at Stony Brook probably has better math program than NYU. At least, they had John Milnor. If you don't know who he is then you are not that hardcore of a math dude. hehe. In general, I must admit that NYU has a decent math program. An ex-quant colleague I used to work with has a MS from Princeton and Phd from NYU. Solid guy. NYU has a really good quant fin program too. And a fellow classmate of mine took some quant finance classes at NYU and he said it's pretty solid and good. But the top 4 math programs in the nation are still Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Berkeley. Not to put down Oxford or anything, but it has lost its leadership in math a while back to the great American math universities like Harvard and MIT for decades now. After Prof Hardy (a la number theorist) and Whitehead, it hadn't done much. I haven't seen or heard of a Field medalists from Oxford recently. Actually, except for Donaldson and Atiyah which I both highly respect who won the Fields Medal from Oxford. But Atiyah later left Oxford for Cambridge. trader99 P.S. When Grigori (Grisha) Perelman of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics solved the Poincare Conjecture, he went to MIT to give a lecture at 10-250 lecture hall. I don't see him coming to NYU to give his proofs. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2003-04-15/poincare/
FF, I went to this webpage: http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/admissions/postgrad/courses/mscmafcs/ Not a bad program. Fairly rigorous. Covering even very general stuff like Lie Algebra and Representation Theory. A bit of overkill for studying cs though. haha! Computational Methods for Finite Fields should be interesting. I learned some of that back when I was only in high school working on a science fair project. But obviously, it's not to that level. But still good stuff. Over time, I've drifted from discrete algebraic stuff to move continuous stuff. well, good luck -99
You know how there is always one a$$hole in a class raising his hand and asking question after question in an attempt to gain attention and tell everyone how bright they think they are..... I predict: 1. FF has already adopted an English accent as he tries to get laid in NYC with the: "cheerio, I'm from Oxfurd" schtick. 2. He'll need to find another game to prop up his ego and insecurities since the Oxford Schtick won't work in Oxford. FF, kind of reminds me of the bird in American Pie: "when in band camp I stuck my flute ..."
Yes, paradoxically his relative triteness is likely to stick out like a sore thumb when he is living in the midst of other Oxford students... it could indeed be a befittingly humbling experience for him... at the same time it could be a highly constructive experience for him, in that he will be rapidly relieved of the artificial pedestal of superiority that he has created for himself...
If this thread truly is a joke then many of us have been taken for a ride, myself included. But what the the heck, it sure did liven things up around here
And the funny thing is, FF will finally be a small fish in a big pond. He might be top student at NYU but he'll meet his match and beyond at Oxford. He was a big fish in a small pond. Then he'll realize he might no longer be the "best" when he's in class with some of the best students in the world, not just at NYU. They might even laugh behind his back. -99