Monday 23 March 2015

The bigger they are

An interesting story buzzing around the net for the last few days concerns mathematician John Urschel. He recently published a joint paper titled 'A Cascadian Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians' The fact that he published such a paper is not that suprising really, as he does hold a masters in Mathematics.
Slightly more interesting is that he is also a chess player. According to one bio I saw he played in the Under 1700 section of the 2015 Pittsburg Open, scoring 3/5. Of course that does not make him that special, but neither maths or chess is his current day job.
The real reason why his paper has attracted so much attention is that when he isn't writing papers or studying chess, he is an offensive linesman for the Baltimore Ravens NFL Team. An odd mix of career  (although not completely unknown) but one he is comfortable with for know.
More background on both his paper, and his sporting career can be found here.

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