[asgard1024]

"It's an interesting question when you consider that in at least two university mathematics department rankings[1][2], the US holds 7 of the top 10 global spots."

It's a fallacy. US is a large country, so those talented students concentrate in fewer universities. In Europe for instance, due to language and culture barriers, talented students from Czech Republic do not very often go to Cambridge. You need to look at mean or median if you want accurate assessment.

[hawkice]

China is a larger country with extremely promising mathematics scores. So why is it not 8/10 China and 2/10 US (in proportion to population) or even more extreme? A large country having access to a large talent poll doesn't get very close to explaining what's going on.

[asgard1024]

It's hard to tell, but it can be because most maths research is published in Chinese, while these rankings are little anglocentric. Also lot of Chinese probably migrate to the US as soon as they can. Anyway, I was just pointing out that the ranking is not such a simple argument.