John Urschel is MUCH more than a professional football player.
The Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman will be going into his second year in the NFL, and a solid rookie season is far from his biggest accomplishment. Urschel is now a published mathematician.
Apart from working his way through the rungs of the life of an NFL player, Urschel found the time to co-author a section in Journal of Computational Mathematics, titled; “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians”…I can promise you I am just as confused as you are. To make it worse, here is a small excerpt of the article:
…as well as a direct link to the project in it’s entirety, if for some reason you feel inclined to dig deeper into this whole “math stuff”.
With a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mathematics from Penn State, combined with growing concerns dealing with older age and head trauma, many wonder why Urschel would continue to subject his body to the brutality of pro football, while he clearly possesses the intelligence to soar in other endeavors?
Urschel recently touched on these questions and a lot more in a worthwhile piece over on the Player’s Tribune. Definitely an interesting read. Here is part of the explanation he offered:
“I play because I love the game. I love hitting people. There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else. My teammates, friends and family can attest to this: When I go too long without physical contact I’m not a pleasant person to be around. This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work. I’ve fallen in love with the sport of football and the physical contact associated with it.”
Very nice to see jocks going against the stereotype.
[h/t SN]
