John Urschel

Last updated

John Urschel
John Urschel.JPG
Urschel in 2015
Born (1991-06-24) June 24, 1991 (age 33)
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions
Thesis Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems  (2017)
Doctoral advisor Michel Goemans

American football career
Personal information
Height:6 ft 3 in (1.91 m)
Weight:300 lb (136 kg)
Career information
High school: Canisius (Buffalo, New York)
College: Penn State
NFL draft: 2014  / round: 5 / pick: 175
Career history
Career highlights and awards
Career NFL statistics
Games played:40
Games started:13
Stats at Pro Football Reference

John Cameron Urschel (born June 24, 1991) is a Canadian-American mathematician and former professional football guard. [1] [2] He played college football at Penn State and was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL draft. Urschel played his entire NFL career with Baltimore before announcing his retirement on July 27, 2017, at 26 years old.

Contents

Urschel has bachelor's and master's degrees (both from Penn State) and a PhD (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), all in mathematics. [3] [4] Urschel is also an advanced stats columnist for The Players' Tribune . He served a three-year term on the College Football Playoff selection committee which began in the spring of 2020, [5] and is an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [6]

Early life and education

Urschel was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His parents, John Urschel and Venita Parker, were a surgeon and attorney, respectively. [7] He grew up in Buffalo, New York where he graduated from Canisius High School in 2009. [5]

At Pennsylvania State University, Urschel earned both a bachelor's degree in 2012 and a master's 2013 degree in mathematics before earning his PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021. [8] While at Penn State, he was awarded the William V. Campbell Trophy, known as the "academic Heisman".

Professional football career

Pre-draft measurables
HeightWeightArm lengthHand span 40-yard dash 10-yard split20-yard split 20-yard shuttle Three-cone drill Vertical jump Broad jump Bench press Wonderlic
6 ft 3 in
(1.91 m)
313 lb
(142 kg)
33 in
(0.84 m)
10+38 in
(0.26 m)
5.31 s1.84 s3.08 s4.47 s7.55 s29.0 in
(0.74 m)
8 ft 6 in
(2.59 m)
30 reps43 [9]
All values from NFL Combine [10] [11]

Urschel was selected by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL draft. [12] He played in 11 games, starting three, for the Ravens in 2014. He appeared in 16 games, starting seven, for the team in 2015. He played in 13 games, starting three, his final season in 2016. [13]

On July 27, 2017, Urschel announced his retirement from the NFL after three seasons. [14] [15] The Baltimore Sun reported that the JAMA study on the prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in deceased players was a factor in Urschel's decision. [16] Officially he stated, "This [CTE] was actually a serious, serious concern of mine. Yes, I am retiring; I did retire. But at the same time, I love the NFL. I love football. I wouldn't trade my experiences for the world. I do believe that football is a great game. I didn't want to be fodder for anti-football establishments." [17]

His retirement as an active player was not the end of his participation in the sport. He was appointed to the College Football Playoff selection committee on January 22, 2020, serving a three-year term which began in the spring of that year. [5]

Mathematics career

While doing his master's at Penn State, Urschel was involved in teaching vector calculus, trigonometry and analytic geometry, and introduction to econometrics. [18] In 2014, Urschel was named Arthur Ashe, Jr. Sports Scholar by Diverse: Issues In Higher Education. [19] In 2015, Urschel co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics [20] titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians". It includes "a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue." [21]

Urschel began a Ph.D. in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, [22] focusing on spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning. [23] MIT does not allow Ph.D. students to study part-time; while the Ravens knew that he was taking classes, Urschel admitted after retiring from the team that he did not disclose that he was a full-time graduate student, having taken correspondence classes in between games and practices. [24] On January 4, 2017, Urschel was named to Forbes' "30 Under 30" list of outstanding young scientists and owns the following blurb: "Urschel has published six peer-reviewed mathematics papers to date and has three more ready for review. He's won academic awards for his math prowess. All this while playing guard for the Baltimore Ravens." [25] [26] [27]

Since 2017, Urschel has had an Erdős number of 4. His PhD thesis on Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems was completed in 2021 under Michel Goemans at MIT. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. [28] In the Fall of 2023, Urschel joined the faculty of MIT as an assistant professor in the MIT Math department. [29] [30] He is also a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (currently on leave). [31]

Awards and honors

Papers

  • Dhruv Rohatgi, John C. Urschel, Jake Wellens. "Regarding Two Conjectures on Clique and Biclique Partitions", Preprint, arXiv : 2005.02529.
  • John C. Urschel, "Uniform Error Estimates for the Lanczos Method", Preprint, arXiv : 2003.09362.
  • John C. Urschel, Jake Wellens. "Testing k-Planarity Is NP-Complete", Information Processing Letters.
  • Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Ankur Moitra, Philippe Rigollet, John C. Urschel. "Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Determinantal Point Processes", Preprint, arXiv : 1701.06501.
  • John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. "Discrete Trace Theorems and Energy Minimizing Spring Embeddings of Planar Graphs", Linear Algebra and Its Applications, 2021.
  • John C. Urschel. "Nodal Decompositions of Graphs", Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Volume 539, 60-71, 2018.
  • John C. Urschel. "On the Characterization and Uniqueness of Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations", SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, 55(3), 1525-1547, 2017.
  • John C. Urschel, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Ankur Moitra, Phillipe Rigollet. "Learning Determinantal Point Processes with Moments and Cycles", International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2017.
  • Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Ankur Moitra, Philippe Rigollet, John Urschel. "Rates of Estimation for Determinantal Point Processes", Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), 2017.
  • Xiaozhe Hu, John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. "On the Approximation of Laplacian Eigenvalues in Graph Disaggregation", Linear and Multilinear Algebra, 65(9): 1805-1822, 2017.
  • John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. "On the Maximal Error of Spectral Approximation of Graph Bisection", Linear and Multilinear Algebra, 64(10): 1972-1979, 2016.
  • John C. Urschel, Xiaozhe Hu, Jinchao Xu, Ludmil Zikatanov. "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians", Journal of Computational Mathematics, Volume 33 No. 2, 2015, 209-226.
  • John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. "Spectral Bisection of Graphs and Connectednes"s, Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Volume 449, 1-16, 2014.
  • John C. Urschel. "A Space-Time Multigrid Method for the Numerical Valuation of Barrier Options", Communications in Mathematical Finance, Volume 2, no. 3, 1-20, 2013.
  • John C. Urschel, Joseph R. Galante. "Instabilities in the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem", Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, Volume 115, Issue 3, 233–259, 2013

Chess

Urschel competed in the 2015 Pittsburgh Open, finishing in 12th place (tied for 9th) with 3.0 points (+2-1=2) in the Under 1700 rating section. [36] [37] Urschel competes in competitive online chess on Chess.com, and he has commentated for Chess.com's BlitzChamps event, a rapid tournament for NFL players.

Personal life

Urschel is married to writer Louisa Thomas, whom he met when she was profiling him for Grantland . They have two children. [38] [39] Urschel's autobiography, Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football, was co-written by Thomas and published in 2019. [40] [41]

See also

  • Frank Ryan – former NFL player and mathematician, who maintained an academic career while playing in the league

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maple (software)</span> Mathematical computing environment

Maple is a symbolic and numeric computing environment as well as a multi-paradigm programming language. It covers several areas of technical computing, such as symbolic mathematics, numerical analysis, data processing, visualization, and others. A toolbox, MapleSim, adds functionality for multidomain physical modeling and code generation.

In mathematics, spectral graph theory is the study of the properties of a graph in relationship to the characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors of matrices associated with the graph, such as its adjacency matrix or Laplacian matrix.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ADE classification</span>

In mathematics, the ADE classification is a situation where certain kinds of objects are in correspondence with simply laced Dynkin diagrams. The question of giving a common origin to these classifications, rather than a posteriori verification of a parallelism, was posed in. The complete list of simply laced Dynkin diagrams comprises

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algebraic graph theory</span> Branch of mathematics

Algebraic graph theory is a branch of mathematics in which algebraic methods are applied to problems about graphs. This is in contrast to geometric, combinatoric, or algorithmic approaches. There are three main branches of algebraic graph theory, involving the use of linear algebra, the use of group theory, and the study of graph invariants.

In numerical analysis, a multigrid method is an algorithm for solving differential equations using a hierarchy of discretizations. They are an example of a class of techniques called multiresolution methods, very useful in problems exhibiting multiple scales of behavior. For example, many basic relaxation methods exhibit different rates of convergence for short- and long-wavelength components, suggesting these different scales be treated differently, as in a Fourier analysis approach to multigrid. MG methods can be used as solvers as well as preconditioners.

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific society devoted to applied mathematics, and roughly two-thirds of its membership resides within the United States. Founded in 1951, the organization began holding annual national meetings in 1954, and now hosts conferences, publishes books and scholarly journals, and engages in advocacy in issues of interest to its membership. Members include engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, both those employed in academia and those working in industry. The society supports educational institutions promoting applied mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilbert Strang</span> American mathematician (born 1934)

William Gilbert Strang is an American mathematician known for his contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis and linear algebra. He has made many contributions to mathematics education, including publishing mathematics textbooks. Strang was the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught Linear Algebra, Computational Science, and Engineering, Learning from Data, and his lectures are freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algebraic connectivity</span> Second-smallest eigenvalue of a graph Laplacian

The algebraic connectivity of a graph G is the second-smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix of G. This eigenvalue is greater than 0 if and only if G is a connected graph. This is a corollary to the fact that the number of times 0 appears as an eigenvalue in the Laplacian is the number of connected components in the graph. The magnitude of this value reflects how well connected the overall graph is. It has been used in analyzing the robustness and synchronizability of networks.

Miroslav Fiedler was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to linear algebra, graph theory and algebraic graph theory.

In mathematics, a representation is a very general relationship that expresses similarities between mathematical objects or structures. Roughly speaking, a collection Y of mathematical objects may be said to represent another collection X of objects, provided that the properties and relationships existing among the representing objects yi conform, in some consistent way, to those existing among the corresponding represented objects xi. More specifically, given a set Π of properties and relations, a Π-representation of some structure X is a structure Y that is the image of X under a homomorphism that preserves Π. The label representation is sometimes also applied to the homomorphism itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spectral clustering</span> Clustering methods

In multivariate statistics, spectral clustering techniques make use of the spectrum (eigenvalues) of the similarity matrix of the data to perform dimensionality reduction before clustering in fewer dimensions. The similarity matrix is provided as an input and consists of a quantitative assessment of the relative similarity of each pair of points in the dataset.

Daniel Alan Spielman has been a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale University since 2006. As of 2018, he is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science at Yale. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, since its founding, and chair of the newly established Department of Statistics and Data Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Larson</span> American mathematician

Roland "Ron" Edwin Larson is a professor of mathematics at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Pennsylvania. He is best known for being the author of a series of widely used mathematics textbooks ranging from middle school through the second year of college.

Yasutaka Ihara is a Japanese mathematician and professor emeritus at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. His work in number theory includes Ihara's lemma and the Ihara zeta function.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Edelman</span> American mathematician

Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society (AMS), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), for his contributions in numerical linear algebra, computational science, parallel computing, and random matrix theory. He is one of the creators of the technical programming language Julia.

Superstrong approximation is a generalisation of strong approximation in algebraic groups G, to provide spectral gap results. The spectrum in question is that of the Laplacian matrix associated to a family of quotients of a discrete group Γ; and the gap is that between the first and second eigenvalues. Here Γ is a subgroup of the rational points of G, but need not be a lattice: it may be a so-called thin group. The "gap" in question is a lower bound for the difference of those eigenvalues.

The Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra is awarded every three years by the International Linear Algebra Society. It recognizes research, contributions, and achievements at the highest level of linear algebra and was first awarded in 1993. It may be awarded for an outstanding scientific achievement or for lifetime contributions and may be awarded to more than one recipient. The award honors Hans Schneider, "one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th Century in the field of linear algebra and matrix analysis.” The prize includes a plaque, certificate and/or a monetary award.

Shmuel Friedland is an Israeli-American mathematician.

Bruce Reznick is an American mathematician long on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is a prolific researcher noted for his contributions to number theory and the combinatorial-algebraic-analytic investigations of polynomials. In July 2019, to mark his 66th birthday, a day long symposium "Bruce Reznick 66 fest: A mensch of Combinatorial-Algebraic Mathematics" was held at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

References

  1. "Baltimore Ravens: John Urschel". Archived from the original on September 3, 2017. Retrieved September 14, 2017.
  2. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on July 16, 2016. Retrieved December 13, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. "Ravens Lineman John Urschel Loves Math More Than You Love Anything". Deadspin. March 20, 2015. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
  4. "John Urschel". Twitter. May 23, 2013. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
  5. 1 2 3 Lenzi, Rachel. "Canisius High graduate John Urschel joins College Football Playoff selection committee," The Buffalo (NY) News, Wednesday, January 22, 2020. Retrieved December 19, 2022.
  6. "John Urschel's Homepage". math.mit.edu. Retrieved September 23, 2023.
  7. Ellenberg, Jordan (September 28, 2018). "John Urschel Goes Pro". Hmm Daily. Retrieved September 29, 2018.
  8. "John Urschel's Homepage". math.mit.edu. Retrieved December 31, 2024.
  9. "Wonderlic test at combine wasn't scary for John Urschel". nbcsports.com. February 15, 2016. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  10. "John Urschel Draft and Combine Prospect Profile". NFL.com. Retrieved May 10, 2014.
  11. "John Urschel, Penn State, OG, 2014 NFL Draft Scout, NCAA College Football". draftscout.com. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  12. "2014 NFL Draft Listing". Pro-Football-Reference.com. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  13. "John Urschel". pro-football-reference.com. Sports Reference LLC. Retrieved April 22, 2016.
  14. Mink, Ryan (July 27, 2017). "Genius Mathematician John Urschel Is Retiring From the NFL". BaltimoreRavens.com. Archived from the original on July 28, 2017.
  15. Orr, Conor (July 27, 2017). "John Urschel tells Ravens he's retiring from NFL". NFL.com. Archived from the original on July 28, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2020.
  16. Walker, Childs; Dance, Scott; Zrebiec, Jeff (July 27, 2017). "Concerned with long-term damage from head injuries, Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel retires". The Baltimore Sun . Archived from the original on December 1, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2020.
  17. "John Urschel Tells the Full Story of Why He Retired, And Why He Doesn't Want it to Hurt Football". www.baltimoreravens.com. Retrieved November 29, 2023.
  18. "John Urschel's Homepage". math.mit.edu. Archived from the original on December 8, 2018. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  19. "John Urschel". Diverse: Issues In Higher Education. Cox, Matthews, and Associates. March 31, 2014. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
  20. Mullen, Jethro (March 22, 2015). "Unusual equation: Baltimore Ravens' guard John Urschel is a math whiz". CNN.com. Retrieved March 22, 2015.
  21. Urschel, John C.; Hu, Xiaozhe; Xu, Jinchao; Zikatanov, Ludmil T. (2015). "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians" (PDF). Journal of Computational Mathematics. 33 (2): 209–226. arXiv: 1412.0565 . doi:10.4208/jcm.1412-m2014-0041. S2CID   7241927. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 27, 2015. Retrieved April 20, 2015.
  22. Miller, Stephen D. (2016). "'I plan to be a great mathematician': An NFL Offensive Lineman Shows He's One of Us" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society . 63 (2): 148–151. doi: 10.1090/noti1331 .
  23. Clements, Ron (May 25, 2016). "Ravens guard John Urschel's straight-A streak continues at MIT". Sporting News. Retrieved June 9, 2016.
  24. Heck, Jordan (September 7, 2017). "John Urschel didn't tell Ravens he was a full-time Ph.D. student at MIT while in the NFL". Sporting News. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
  25. "Ravens' John Urschel makes prestigious Forbes '30 Under 30' list". January 4, 2017. Retrieved September 14, 2017.
  26. "John Urschel". Forbes . Retrieved September 14, 2017.
  27. "Michel Goemans People". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved November 1, 2020.
  28. "MR:Search MSC database". mathscinet.ams.org. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  29. "John Urschel's homepage at MIT" . Retrieved October 1, 2023.
  30. "School of Science welcomes new faculty in 2023". MIT News. September 25, 2023. Retrieved October 1, 2023.
  31. "John Urschel's Homepage". math.mit.edu. Retrieved November 29, 2023.
  32. "Mr. Canisius | Canisius High School" . Retrieved June 12, 2024.
  33. 1 2 "Heard on Campus: John Urschel at the Penn State Forum | Penn State University" . Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  34. "John Urschel". Forbes. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  35. "Announcing the 2024 Honorary Degree Recipients". Dartmouth.edu. April 11, 2024. Retrieved June 10, 2024.
  36. "2015 Pittsburgh Open". United States Chess Federation. November 2, 2016. Retrieved November 2, 2016.
  37. "Mathlete in the House: NFLer-cum-mathematician John Urschel to deliver public lecture at U of M". news.umanitoba.ca. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  38. "It all adds up: Lineman John Urschel loves his post-NFL life". Associated Press . May 30, 2019. Retrieved July 12, 2022.
  39. "John Urschel's Homepage". math.mit.edu. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
  40. Urschel, John; Thomas, Louisa (2019). Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football. ISBN   978-0735224865.
  41. Santa Maria, Cara (August 19, 2019). Talk Nerdy Episode 271 - John Urschel (Podcast).