In this article, I compiled 120 free online courses offered by the 60 best universities in the world for studying math in 2023.

I did so by combining popular university rankings to identify the best institutions, and then I used the Class Central database to find all their math online courses.

If you’d like to jump to the course list, you can jump directly to the course list. If you’d like to know how I built the list, or if you’d like to look at the raw data or Jupyter Notebook, keep reading.

Methodology

top-10-universities-math-2023
Combined ranking: top-10 universities for studying mathematics in 2023

I built the list following the same data-driven approach I used to build my list of computer science courses from the top CS universities.

First, I identified the leading world university rankings. Since I was specifically interested in math, I looked at their latest rankings of the best universities for studying math (or closest superset). Here are the rankings I ended up using:

Second, I scraped each ranking. In the simplest cases, this involved finding the underlying API, allowing me to directly request the ranking data in JSON format using Scrapy. In the most complex case, this involved crawling the ranking page by page using Playwright.

You can find the implementation details and raw data in my GitHub repo.

Third, I used JupyterLab to process the data. In essence, this involved cleaning the raw data, normalizing the university names across the rankings, and combining the three rankings into one by averaging the position of each institution across each ranking.

As you can see in the image above, I found that the top three math institutions are:

  1. MIT
  2. Princeton
  3. Cambridge

You can also find the data processing details and full ranking in my GitHub repo.

Fourth, I used the Class Central database, with its over 150K online courses, to find all the math courses offered by the universities in the ranking.

The end result is a list of 120 online courses offered by 60 of the best universities in the world for studying math in 2023.

While processing the data, I noticed something interesting: 59 of the top 60 universities offer online courses, a lot more than I would have guessed. The world’s top institutions are very prolific creators of online courses.

Online Math Courses

The full list is split into subjects. Click on a subject below to go to the relevant section.

With 120 courses to pick from, I hope you find something you like. But if these aren’t enough, check out the Class Central catalog, which has over 150K online courses, many of them free or free-to-audit.

Mathematics Online Courses (30)

Statistics & Probability Online Courses (38)

Algebra Online Courses (21)

Calculus Online Courses (29)