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Originally Posted by Bryster
Ross
The article that you're referring to in JPE was published while Levitt was in grad school at MIT..
His undergraduate thesis at Harvard for which he won the award for best undergraduate thesis was on thoroughbred breeding.
Also, regarding Levitt's math background when he began at MIT,
'Levitt had taken exactly one math course as an undergraduate and had forgotten even that. During his first graduate class, he asked the student next to him about a formula on the board: Is there any difference between the derivative sign that's straight up-and-down and the curly one? "You are in so much trouble," he was told.'
All of this information is taken directly from Stephen Dubner's 2003 New York Times Magazine article on Levitt, which burgeoned into Freakonomics.
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Dubner may well 'exaggerate the truth' in order to create the right image for Levitt - after all, it enhances the prestige of a person if he went from being a mathematical ignoramus to a Bates Medal winner.
I agree with 'economistsdoitwithmodels' - there is a lot to be said for mathematics done in other courses. Levitt was an 'insider' from the beginning by studying at Harvard and his formal maths background mattered much less.
I would like to believe that today's adcoms would equally carefully look at the maths implicit in other courses (perhaps only possible if these guys know the course being taught - another advantage for 'insiders'). However, despite a few brave souls in this forum asserting that maths is not all-important today, I have yet to be convinced otherwise. There are just too many people that I know that have interesting backgrounds as well as clear display of research potential and yet they have been consistently overlooked by schools.