John Urschel is a math genius. He is also a very large man who can play football quite well. These are two things few people can be at the same time in life.
Urschel has already earned his master's degree in mathematics and is now pursuing his Ph.D. in the same field while attending M.I.T. while writing papers like he posted in this tweet:
New(-ish) solo authored paper on centroidal Voronoi tessellations accepted by SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis!! https://t.co/ocBpjOPkTi pic.twitter.com/cbVaafydig— John Urschel (@JohnCUrschel) April 28, 2017
That good ol' centroidal Voronoi tessellations! How many nights have I lost to the whimsical joys of deciphering that myself!
While Urschel is only 26-years old, in the prime of his football career, today he decided to retire from the sport and devote his life to math.
Urschel, like some other younger players, is concerned about CTE (the trauma the brain undertakes from concussions) and how a recent study by Boston University showed that 110 out of 111 brains from former players showed signs of CTE. It's an issue that's bothered Urschel since he had a concussion in 2015. As Bleacher Report quotes him as saying:
"I think it hurt my ability to think well mathematically. It took me about three weeks before I was football-ready. It took me a little bit longer before my high-level visualizations ability came back."
With his brain still intact, Urschel can get back to tweeting cryptic mathematics like this:
One of the most interesting open problems in discrete math to me right now is the tree packing conjecture. If you solve this, you're my hero pic.twitter.com/SQRbcPwL8C— John Urschel (@JohnCUrschel) May 17, 2017
Tree packing something something something. All I'm envisioning right now is someone shipping a bonsai in a UPS box.
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