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John Urschel: The 300 Pound Mathematician Who Hits People For a Living
HughPickens.com writes: Kate Murphy writes at NYT about mathematician John Urschel whose latest contribution to the mathematical realm was a paper for the Journal of Computational Mathematics with the impressively esoteric title, "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians." "Believe me, I am aware that terms such as multigrid, Fiedler, and vector are not words that people use in their daily lives," says Urshel.
But as an offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens, John Urschel regularly goes head to head with the top defensive players in the NFL and does his best to keep quarterback Joe Flacco out of harm's way. "I play because I love the game. I love hitting people," Urshel writes. "There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."
Urschel acknowledges that he has faced questions from NFL officials, journalists, fans and fellow mathematicians about why he runs the risk of potential brain injury from playing football when he has "a bright career ahead of me in mathematics" but doesn't feel able to quit. "When I go too long without physical contact I'm not a pleasant person to be around. This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work."
But as an offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens, John Urschel regularly goes head to head with the top defensive players in the NFL and does his best to keep quarterback Joe Flacco out of harm's way. "I play because I love the game. I love hitting people," Urshel writes. "There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."
Urschel acknowledges that he has faced questions from NFL officials, journalists, fans and fellow mathematicians about why he runs the risk of potential brain injury from playing football when he has "a bright career ahead of me in mathematics" but doesn't feel able to quit. "When I go too long without physical contact I'm not a pleasant person to be around. This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work."
Scholarly & Athletic: I was a lettering NCAA athlete in Lacrosse (violent enough) for LeMoyne College (an often division or national champ @ division II level) + good enough to get room + board partial combined academic/athletic scholarship for it.
(I was pretty much "straight A's" elementary school to highschool - senior year I didn't give a hoot since I had my credits done by junior year & I went to work after going for 1 class most of senior year only in the a.m. then off to work during the rest of the day, & I even played football as a cornerback defensemen, 1st string for an often state championship winning team in highschool - I didn't play my junior & senior year since my Dad cut off monies he gave me & asked me "how old are you now?" & I said then "16" & he said "you can go work for money now" so, I did... He also pointed out that I should pick one sport over the other, & that football was FAR more dangerous + had more competition for scholarship (nevermind the pros), so, Lacrosse it was instead, since better chance for scholarships etc. that way since I learned & played it in the BEST city in the nation for decades in it, in Syracuse N.Y. ...).
You can be *ANYTHING* you want in this life, both the mind & body are "plastic" responding to the needs you have you place on them...
*There are, no limits: Only the limits you put on yourself...
APK
P.S.=> I think it's great there's people like the man in this article setting that example - it's close to the 'greek ideal' of "sound mind, & sound body"... apk
two years ago i took up tennis at the recommendation of a friend. before that i'd done tai ji, full-contact karate (shin kyu-kshin), long-distance skating (86 miles athens-to-atlanta 1999, 65 miles new york park 1999, 26 miles rotterdam 2006) and yoga (ashtanga and T.M Asanas). it's a big list of different physical activities, which have the following things in common:
* complex coordinated movement
* requiring or recommending very deep breathing (skating especially)
* very long and regular practice
the reason why i specifically love tennis is that in addition to these things it is necessary to not only be extremely physically fit but also, if you would like to win, you require strategy and planning both on and off the court. tennis is particularly harsh on the body in that it is a series of very short explosive sprints, standing still, *then* hitting the ball, and then doing it all over again.
also the types of movement required are *unbelievably* complex! serving involves *six* degrees of freedom of movement (x-y-z, rotation in x-y-z) in order to impart the maximum amount of inspired deviousness into a small yellow round object.
to fully understand why it was that, aged 44, i started this sport and now practice over an hour a day, you have to understand that prior to that i was sitting 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen: average distance approx 1 metre. for the prior 4 years that was a 24in imac, so the panorama i *initially* thought was great.... turned out to have caused extreme alterations in my eyes.
just over two years ago i discovered that my eyes had gone "prism". this is a new development: i've always had -0.75 astigmatism, but prism basically means that i can focus easily on an object that's 1 metre away, but if i look at something 3 metres or greater away i see *DOUBLE*. in the dark, i can't bring the two together.
the implications of that are that not only has there been physical damage caused by long-term computer usage but that there has also been *NEURAL* damage caused by long-term computer usage.
the bottom line of this story is, in this context, that this football player is being extremely sensible. if a few neurons get knocked out of place by a concussion, so damn what: his pursuit of mathematics will, by virtue of it being so incredibly challenging, allow him to grow new pathways and literally grow new neurons. the reason why his peers get brain damage is because they *don't* have anything other than football to challenge them.
each of his pursuits therefore supports the others. the physical exertion keeps his body - and his heart - fit. that in turn allows him more oxygen with which to feed his brain and thus sustain the pursuit of mathematics. the increased mental alertness allows him to play with tactics and strategy that the average player would not be able to consider. his specialty in mathematics would allow him to apply physics (moments of inertia) in a *really* practical way that would keep both him and the people he smacks down safer than would otherwise be done by someone without his knowledge.
but the best part of all this is that if he has a successful long-term career, i predict that he will end up inspiring thousands of young football players to pay a bit closer attention to their other studies, and that coaches will have an example - a specific person - that they can quote as to why, when they go recruiting, they are looking for someone who has not only the physique but also the high academic aptitude as well. ... wouldn't it be great to have an entire team of football players who not only kick ass (literally) but who have degrees and even PhDs? that would change how people think of football, forever.
This just shows that you don't know what the word means. I've know a couple of real sociopaths over a lifetime, and they were mean, manipulative, vindictive arseholes. One thing that they were not, was violent. They preferred to destroy people in more lasting and important ways than a few bruises. The closest everyday concept that mcuttatches the condition is evil.
Most blokes like burning off steam though. Not all of them, some are more shy retiring delicate types such as yourself. But for most men, regardless of whether they end up in the ivory towers of academia or cutting blocks in a yard, physical contact is normal. Success tends to correlate with the ability to control it and project it on demand. That's why we see sports as being a good outlet for it. I've known surprising number of martial artists in academia, they were all very straight forward about why they did it: they like punching things.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
"There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."
This is your indication that you are talking with an adrenaline/endorphin junkie.
I play futbol (soccer) defense, and can completely understand this. Its an otherwise thankless position. If you do it well pretty much nobody but your goalie notices, and if you mess up everyone hates on you. So why do it? Honestly, I believe I got addicted to the adrenaline/endorphin hit. I don't even feel right until I've had my first hard tackle. It is next to impossible to get that fix in real life, but a good physical confrontation will bring it right up. I once hadn't got there yet, and then a (clearly juicing) big forward knocked me to the ground while the ref wasn't looking. I got up laughing and thanking him. Not quite the reaction he was expecting.
I don't know how many here have seen Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way but Loose, but the main character Philo clearly had this as well. It was a major plot point that he had to fight, and had an unusual thing where he got better the more he was hit. Classic Endorphin/Adrenaline junkie.
I think it ought to go without saying that as a mathematician Urschel isn't going to get his body chemical "hit" in his daily life. I've certainly found that to be the case as a software engineer.
I think that the 'surprise' here is related to the (quite numerous, now that the NFL has pretty much lost the battle to keep CTE under wraps) stories about how the head trauma you experience in football has a nasty habit of wrecking your brain in a variety of unpleasant ways.
The fact that not all math professors are wholly sedentary, feeble, and bookish isn't a huge surprise; but seeing one doing something well known to have a high risk of chewing up his brain and spitting it out, that is somewhat curious. I would have expected him to choose something with more below-the-neck contact. Soft tissue damage and broken bones are something that humans cope with fairly well, and Team Medicine knows a lot about dealing with, if natural recuperation isn't cutting it; but brains are touchier; and there is a lot less we can do for you if yours isn't working so well.
Given the NFL's more or less uniformly dishonorable record on football related traumatic brain injury (roughly the same honesty, and similar stalling tactics, as tobacco producers); it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they are worried about this guy because he's a football player with an easily demonstrable history of high intellectual capability.
If he ends up a pitiful sad-sack, markedly damaged, the story pretty much writes itself: "From published mathematician with lots of papers you don't even understand the title of, to broken man, thanks to football!". In players without any baseline, or where the baseline is roughly 'normal to sub-normal intelligence, no non-football skills of significant note', there may still end up being a sad story of cognitive effects(it doesn't just knock off IQ points, depression, emotional disregulation, and other quality-of-life ruiners are pretty typical); but the story won't be nice and clear cut in the same way.
I know it's just an anecdote, but in my personal experience, at the higher levels of football (college and up: I played in college and have known several people that have moved on to the NFL) it takes a certain amount of intelligence to succeed, simply because the plays and the calls get more complicated. And while the stereotype of offensive linemen is that they are big and dumb, from what I have seen is that they actually tend to be smarter than other players. On my college team at least 2-3 out of our teams academic top 10 every year were offensive linemen, and a surprising number of our offensive linemen went on to graduate school, whether at our school or others. Of course, I may be slightly biased as I was an offensive lineman, I was one of those that went to grad school, and I was on my team's academic top 10 all 4 years.
Another interesting observation I have made is that certain personalities or characteristics seem to congregate to certain positions. For example, if you were to walk through a college or NFL locker room, more often than not you can tell if a player is offense or defense based solely on the state of their locker: offensive players tend to have cleaner, more organized lockers while defensive players tend to have messier, jumbled lockers.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You do realize that most if you go down lists of people who are either confirmed sociopaths or suspected sociopaths, you get a list of serial killers, most CEOs of major corporations, most world leaders, etc. People who like to hit other people aren't typically considered sociopaths. Sociopaths destroy the people around them and society in general as they don't feel the need to conform to social norms and are completely willing to bend those norms and manipulate people to their gain. That's why they tend to end up in positions of power. One of the classical signs of being a sociopath is to have a complete lack of empathy. To know what you are doing is wrong and will hurt others, but to not care about it.
For him to show signs of sociopath tendencies, he'd have to go around hitting people any time he felt he could get away with it, whether or not they're consenting. The fact that he limits it to consensual situations explicitly defines him as to not be a sociopath.
If you don't understand the difference between enjoying sports and racing to release endorphins and:
I love hitting people
then there's really no helping you.
Nonsense. I've played Ice Hockey for years as a way of getting excercise, stress release, and agression control.
And that works a trick. I was always considered the face of calm rationality at work, the guy that doesn't bother to panic. Assertive but never aggressive. On the ice however, a bit different of a story. I modelled my play after Esa Tikkanen, and Darius Kasparitus, Clowns on the ice that you mess with at you own risk. so I gave and took my fair share of hits.
A hockey player that abuses his wife is pretty rare. We tend to have no agression left after the games. A lot of successful people play that sport, and yes, it is pretty violent. Just like we love it. And yes, we love hitting people within the context of the game. We don't need your help.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.