Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football

Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football

Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football

Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football

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Overview

A New York Times bestseller

John Urschel, mathematician and former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, tells the story of a life balanced between two passions


For John Urschel, what began as an insatiable appetite for puzzles as a child developed into mastery of the elegant systems and rules of mathematics. By the time he was thirteen, Urschel was auditing a college-level calculus course. But when he joined his high school football team, a new interest began to eclipse the thrill he felt in the classroom. Football challenged Urschel in an entirely different way, and he became addicted to the physical contact of the sport. After he accepted a scholarship to play at Penn State, his love of math was rekindled. As a Nittany Lion, he refused to sacrifice one passion for the other. Against the odds, Urschel found a way to manage his double life as a scholar and an athlete. While he was an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, he simultaneously pursued his PhD in mathematics at MIT.

Weaving together two separate narratives, Urschel relives for us the most pivotal moments of his bifurcated life. He explains why, after Penn State was sanctioned for the acts of former coach Jerry Sandusky, he declined offers from prestigious universities and refused to abandon his team. He describes his parents’ different influences and their profound effect on him, and he opens up about the correlation between football and CTE and the risks he took for the game he loves. Equally at home discussing Georg Cantor’s work on infinities and Bill Belichick’s playbook, Urschel reveals how each challenge—whether on the field or in the classroom—has brought him closer to understanding the two different halves of his own life, and how reason and emotion, the mind and the body, are always working together. “So often, people want to divide the world into two,” he observes. “Matter and energy. Wave and particle. Athlete and mathematician. Why can’t something (or someone) be both?”

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780735224865
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 05/14/2019
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 1,102,004
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Urschel is a former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens and a PhD candidate at MIT. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics from Penn State, and in 2013, he won the Sullivan Award, given to “the most outstanding amateur athlete in the United States,” and the Campbell Trophy, awarded to the country’s top scholar-athlete in college football. 

Louisa Thomas is the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams and Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I. She is a contributor at the New Yorker and a former writer and editor for Grantland. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York TimesVogue, and other places.

John and Louisa live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with their daughter.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 Puzzles 1

2 The Photograph 15

3 Crashing Calculus Class 19

4 Canisius 25

5 Rocket Science 33

6 Recruitment 39

7 Arriving at Penn State 47

8 Pushing until Failure 57

9 Probability 65

10 We Are 73

11 Q.E.D. 83

12 Who's Jerry Sandusky? 97

13 Proof 107

14 Sanctions 117

15 Computers 121

16 Who Needs Bowl Games? 131

17 Graph Theory 137

18 Senior Season 147

19 Spectral Bisection 155

20 Combine 163

21 John von Neumann 171

22 Becoming a Raven 181

23 Challenging Conventions 199

24 Concussion 205

25 Uncertainty 211

26 MIT Football 219

27 Passing a Test 227

28 Moving On 231

Acknowledgments 237

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