Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are quick to read the coverage and they get called smart all the time for it. Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel puts that praise in perspective with his latest accomplishment. Urschel co-authored a paper that was recenly published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. It’s called: A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians. Meaning that when John Urschel tweets “Happy Pi Day”, as he did on March 14, he really means it.
Urschel is a little like the rockstar Brian May, guitarist of Queen and astrophysicist. If instead of May jamming with Freddie Mercury he’d been playing a fiercely violent sport and routinely smashing his head (and gifted brain) into other players heads. That makes Urschel’s decision to keep playing football–with all the dangers he’s clearly aware of–especially interesting. Urschel, who holds a master’s degree in mathematics, wrote about his reasons in an article called Why I Still Play Football.
Happy Pi Day!!!! Take some time to check out all of its properties and the amazing things it’s involved in. My favorite is Euler’s identity.
— John Urschel (@MathMeetsFball) March 14, 2015
