“It wasn’t an easy decision,” said John Urschel, on retiring from the NFL to pursue his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Urschel is a mathematician, after all, and he knows how to count. With the recent news that all but one of the brains of deceased NFL players examined in a recent study had CTE (99% of them), Urschel calculated the odds. They weren’t in favor of him taking more hits to the head.
Urschel said he’s excited to pursue his PhD at MIT, part of a long term plan that just got new priority. (Urschel last year published a complex article called “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians” in the Journal of Computational Mathematics.) The move is a reversal based on new evidence, just as scientists are supposed to make: back in March 2015 Urschel published an article explaining why, despite the risks, he still played NFL football.
— John Urschel (@JohnCUrschel) July 27, 2017
