Baltimore Ravens Offensive Lineman John Urschel Co-Wrote A Paper On Mathematics

John Urschel is a lot of things. He’s currently an offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens, where he wears jersey #64. Before the NFL, he played at his Alma mater, Penn State. He also taught math classes at the university.

Wait, what? Urschel is the proud recipient of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mathematics, a fact he frequently flaunts on Twitter and elsewhere. Now he’s got bragging rights in the Ivory Tower, because he just published a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. The paper is titled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians”, and was co-written with three other researchers. Urschel retains the coveted first author position.

Urschel announced the paper’s publication earlier this week:

Here’s a summary from the journal’s website. See if you can decipher it:

In this paper, we develop a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue. This vector has been found to have applications in fields such as graph partitioning and graph drawing. The algorithm is a purely algebraic approach based on a heavy edge coarsening scheme and pointwise smoothing for refinement. To gain theoretical insight, we also consider the related cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems and show its uniform convergence under certain assumptions. Numerical tests are presented for computing the Fiedler vector of several practical graphs, and numerical results show the efficiency and optimality of our proposed cascadic multigrid algorithm.

I honest to Spaghetti Monster have no idea what any of this means, but I’m really happy I found out about this. Urschel is my new favorite player in the NFL, and I propose we get him and Neil deGrasse Tyson into the same room. Soon.

(Via It’s Interesting)