Mathematican–Footballer John Urschel Retires Abruptly

Mathematical and National Football League (NFL) player John Urschel has retired abruptly after the release of the latest chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) study.

It's too bad that he won't continue pursuing both careers, but I have to say that I feel warm and fuzzy about passion for mathematics being such an important facet of his decision. (And his publication record for somebody at his career stage is very impressive even before considering the fact that he's simultaneously been playing pro football, which then makes it astounding.)

"I think it hurt my ability to think well mathematically," Urschel said. "It took me about three weeks before I was football-ready. It took me a little bit longer before my high-level visualizations ability came back."

(Tip of the cap to Eric Eager.

NFL Offensive Lineman by Day, Spectral Graph Theorist by Night

John Urschel is not your ordinary professional football player.

He may be an NFL offensive lineman by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His most recent paper, called "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians", has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that it had been officially accepted for publication. (Based on my googling, the published version of the paper hasn't yet appeared in the journal.)

You can read a draft of Urschel's paper on the arXiv preprint server. I just wish that he used his current affiliation on the paper. That would have been fantastic.

(Tip of the cap to Francis Su.)

Update: Looking at Urschel's academic website, I see that he has prior publications. His website gives the reference for a paper on celestial mechanics. I also checked Mathematical Reviews (to find an upper bound on his Erdős Number, of course), and I see that he also has at least one more paper on spectral graph theory. (This paper isn't listed on Urschel's Penn State website, which I suppose he is no longer updating.)

Update (3/21/15): I wrote a blurb on Urschel for the Improbable Research blog.

Bo Knows...

I am very happy that Rob Neyer linked to this "Bo Knows" commercial in this article. This commercial is one of the greatest --- and perhaps the greatest --- commercial in one of the greatest ad campaigns of all time.