I really enjoyed writing this post.
John Urschel is an amazingly talented young man that I’ve profiled before on this blog. Not only is he an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, but he’s also an accomplished young mathematician who was just accepted into the doctorate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From the news article:
The 6’3”, 305-pound offensive lineman will begin a PhD in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. The Hulk-like math geek, who graduated from Penn State with a 4.0 grade point average, will study spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning.
In 2015, Urschel played in the NFL playoffs for the Ravens while simultaneously (pdf) working on a paper on graph eigenfunctions. (What have you done lately?) The paper, entitled, “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fielder Vector of Graph Laplacians,” is available online.
