A guy who used to protect NFL quarterbacks is now involved with something else entirely: one of math's most basic tools. The Washington Post profiles John Urschel, a former Baltimore Ravens lineman who walked away from the football league in 2017 over concerns about brain injuries and is now a tenure-track math professor at MIT. The 35-year-old's latest claim to fame is a new paper, "On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices," which tackles a long-standing theoretical question about Gaussian elimination—the workhorse algorithm used to solve systems of linear equations that underlie everything from circuits to banking models.
Mathematicians knew the algorithm worked almost all the time in practice, but they hadn't nailed down how utterly reliable it really is in a rigorous sense. Urschel's preprint research argues it's extremely close to always dependable, a result that one Berkeley researcher calls an answer to a "big question in the field." The Post piece traces Urschel's path from concussions and offensive lines to obscurity-embracing academics, and how his NFL past quietly shadows his life as a regular old mathematician." "I'm really enjoying obscurity," he says. "I actually really like that I go places, no one knows who I am and no one really cares." He adds, per the Wall Street Journal: "I'm living my best life right now." For the full story and what his breakthrough actually shows, more here (plus, more here on his "remarkable" story).
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