On MathJobs, what does "Faculty contacts in our dept?" means? I've noticed that several MathJobs applications asks "Faculty contacts in our dept?", always with this exact, confusing wording.

I'm not clear what this means. Can someone explain?

Is it, "do you personally know anyone in our faculty?" or is it "who is the person in our faculty that's closest to your research area so that they can evaluate your application?"
This is a really really important question, and it's really important that the correct answer is option 2.  Most graduate students interpret it to mean 1, and this puts them at a disadvantage.  You should list any people in the department who might be interested in serving a postdoc mentor for you.  You should always list someone.

There are two main reasons for this:


On mathjobs you can run a search for all applicants who listed a given faculty member as a contact.  I always look at the applicants who list me as a reference.  Along with sending an email, this is the best way to assure that at least one person looks at your file.
When I served on the postdoc hiring committee I was responsible for looking through 20% of the applicants.  We're only going to hire a postdoc if there's a good research match for them in the department who is interested in mentoring them.  If I see a good file, one of the most important things is to make it easy for me to know which faculty member to mention the file to.  Sometimes I can work that out myself, but it's not always obvious.  Listing someone as faculty contact immediately indicates who I should email.