Asia has one institution in global top 20 for mathematics, and it's not China or Singapore's

Japan's Kyoto University is the only Asian institution to rank among the world's top 20 universities for mathematics in the 2026 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, which is dominated by universities in the United States and Europe.

Published by ShanghaiRanking, the ranking evaluates 500 universities worldwide based on mathematics research performance across five broad areas: world-class faculty, research output, research quality, research impact and international collaboration.

Kyoto University ranked 16th globally with a total score of 249.7, supported by strong performances in faculty and research output.

Kyoto University Clock Tower Centennial Hall and the Camphor Tree in Kyoto, Japan, July 2021. Photo by the university fanpage

The top five positions went to Princeton University in the United States, Paris-Saclay University in France, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., and the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Kyoto University was followed by Imperial College London in 17th place, Université Paris Cité in 18th, the University of Toronto in 19th and Columbia University in 20th.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel ranked 24th, making it the next-highest institution in the ranking from Asia, followed by China's Tsinghua University in 26th place, right after Yale .

Seven other Chinese universities ranked between 32nd (Peking University) and 52nd positions, while the National University of Singapore followed at 56th.

China and Singapore have emerged as rising stars in Asian higher education, with their universities climbing global rankings in recent years.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025, conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), ranked students in China the world's top performers in mathematics and science, as Singapore came second in both subjects.

The ShanghaiRanking focuses on mathematics research rather than overall university performance. ShanghaiRanking uses data from 2020 to 2024 and requires universities to have published at least 100 mathematics papers during that period to qualify.

Bibliometric data are drawn from Web of Science and InCites. Indicators include papers published in first-quartile (Q1) journals, category-normalized citation impact and internationally co-authored papers.

Category-normalized citation impact compares the citations received by a university's papers with the average for publications in the same subject, year and publication type.

As a result, the ranking emphasizes research strength and influence rather than undergraduate teaching quality, student experience, or graduate employment. Its results should therefore be interpreted as a measure of mathematics research performance, not a comprehensive assessment of mathematics degree programs.

ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects assesses universities worldwide across 57 subjects in the natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, medical sciences and social sciences.

Top 20 universities for mathematics according to ShanghaiRanking:

Rank	University	Country	Score
1	Princeton University	United States	407.1
2	Paris-Saclay University	France	359.3
3	University of Oxford	United Kingdom	345.8
4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States	332.0
5	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom	294.0
6	Sorbonne University	United States	293.6
7	Stanford University	United States	291.1
8	ETH Zurich	Switzerland	279.6
9	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne	Switzerland	279.1
10	New York University	United States	277.9
11	University of Chicago	United States	277.8
12	The University of Texas at Austin	United States	262.7
13	University of California, Los Angeles	United States	260.2
14	Harvard University	United States	260.1
15	University of California, Berkeley	United States	256.5
16	Kyoto University	Japan	249.7
17	Imperial College London	United Kingdom	249.1
18	Université Paris Cité	France	243.6
19	University of Toronto	Canada	242.3
20	Columbia University	United States	240.8