Pretty Cool

Pretty cool

Just the other week, Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel co-published a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. The paper “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians” can be found on arXiv.

In an article for the Player’s Tribune, Urschel says, “I am a mathematical researcher in my spare time, continuing to do research in the areas of numerical linear algebra, multigrid methods, spectral graph theory and machine learning. I’m also an avid chess player, and I have aspirations of eventually being a titled player one day.”

This reminded me of this tumblr post by classidiot I saw the other day that describes how it’s common to see mathematicians that are proficient in some non-mathematical hobby (playing an instrument, dancing, hiking, so on…), but often not the other way around. I think it’s really fantastic that John Urschel does mathematics just on the side as something he truly enjoys.