{"id":1112,"date":"2015-04-07T23:00:14","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T04:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/?p=1112"},"modified":"2015-04-08T01:02:24","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T06:02:24","slug":"john-urschel-athletemathlete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/2015\/04\/07\/john-urschel-athletemathlete\/","title":{"rendered":"John Urschel: Athlete, Mathlete"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"John<\/a>

John Urschel (#64) playing for Penn State in 2012. Image: Penn State, via Flickr.<\/p><\/div>\n

A few\u00a0weeks ago, my social media world got pretty excited that\u00a0Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel and his collaborators recently published a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics: <\/i>“A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(That link is to the arxiv version.) I\u2019m pretty sure this is the most the world has ever cared about the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue of a matrix. There were quite a few articles and blog posts about his paper, although not always from the usual math suspects.<\/p>\n

Deadspin reported\u00a0Ravens lineman John Urschel loves math more than you love anything<\/a>. Rolling Stone published an interview with\u00a0this\u00a0lover of graph Laplacians<\/a>. Bloomberg informed us that one of the Baltimore Ravens just published an insanely complex study in a math journal<\/a>, and I\u2019m going to pick on them a little bit. How silly! \u201cOh no, I can\u2019t immediately understand a technical paper in a field I\u2019m not an expert in. It must be insanely complex!\u201d It\u2019s not that the paper isn\u2019t impressive. The Journal of Computational Mathematics is a fine, upstanding journal, and it\u2019s a legitimate result. But calling it \u201cinsanely complex\u201d just makes me roll my eyes. And this isn\u2019t just a case of a hyperbolic headline. The article, instead of presenting a gentle explanation of linear algebra or graph theory, shows us an equation-filled page to prove to us how \u201cinsanely complex\u201d this paper is.<\/p>\n

Luckily, Urschel himself wrote an explanatory post about his paper on Forbes<\/a>. It\u2019s clear, easy to read, and even has a few football analogies for good measure. He defines all the terms in the title and gives us the idea of what the main idea of the paper is: use simpler graphs to approximate a problem on a more complicated graph. I couldn\u2019t use it to compute the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, but I have an idea of why someone might want to.<\/p>\n

I was unaware that the Ravens had a mathematician on the team until I heard about this paper, so I went poking around his online presence. Urschel has a bachelor\u2019s degree in math and a master\u2019s in math education from Penn State, and he\u2019s taught a few classes there. He seems like a really fun guy<\/a>, at least as measured in topology jokes on Twitter<\/a>, and I\u2019d like to meet him. (Sadly, my request to be his bestie<\/a> has so far gone unanswered.)<\/p>\n

Urschel also writes the Advanced Stats column for the Players\u2019 Tribune<\/a>, a relatively new website that features articles by pro athletes. There, he\u2019s written about the transitive property as it relates to head-to-head matchups<\/a> and the distribution of college majors among football players.<\/a> I really admire his public math outreach, especially his constantly positive, upbeat attitude, and his defiance of the stereotype that jocks aren\u2019t good students. (Of course, there are many college and professional athletes who show us that, but another one doesn\u2019t hurt.) I hope that when his NFL days are over, he\u2019ll be able to share math with students who will see him as a role model for both sports and academics.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few\u00a0weeks ago, my social media world got pretty excited that\u00a0Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel and his collaborators recently published a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics: “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.\u201d\u00a0(That … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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