Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football

by John Urschel, Louisa Thomas

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:	9780735224889
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	130,974
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(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 Times, Vogue, 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

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/14/2019

Urschel, a former guard for the Baltimore Ravens, shares his lifelong attempts to reconcile math and football in his captivating memoir. Urschel recalls his childhood attraction to puzzles; they gave him a glimpse of a more logical and orderly world than the one in which he lived as the child of divorced parents. By middle school in Buffalo, N.Y., Urschel, bigger than many of his classmates, wanted to play football in order to fit in. While his lawyer mother encouraged him to develop his considerable intellectual abilities, his father, a surgeon, urged him to develop his football skills. In alternating chapters he recounts his pursuits in both: he enrolled at Penn State in 2010, where he played football and studied math. After graduating, he was drafted in 2014 by the Baltimore Ravens, with whom he played for three seasons; in 2016, he enrolled as a PhD candidate at MIT. Math, Urschel writes, “gives me a way of making sense of the world. It helps me see past the confusion of everyday life and glimpse the underlying structures of the universe.” Urschel’s brilliant memoir explores the challenges of making difficult choices and the rewards of following one’s passions in life. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Captivating. . . . Urschel’s brilliant memoir explores the challenges of making difficult choices and the rewards of following one’s passions in life.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[Mind and Matter] follow[s] Urschel through the academic and athletic rigors that expose the sharp contrasts and surprising connections between the two passions that shape his life—one taxing his brain with proofs and calculations, the other toughening his muscles with gridiron competition. The candid narrative conveys both the intellectual excitement of mathematically formulating the irregularities of an asteroid’s orbit and the physical trauma of sustaining a concussion in blocking a blitzing linebacker. A piquantly improbable memoir.”—Booklist

“The most creative people are those who can embrace very different disciplines: Einstein loving music and physics, Leonardo da Vinci with his art and engineering. John Urschel, in this delightful memoir written with Louisa Thomas, describes his passion for both football and mathematics. He makes Joe Paterno’s fall and Newton’s three-body problem of moving objects equally interesting. But this book is about something much deeper: the importance of grit and determination in all fields of endeavor. Urschel has mastered that in his life, and he can inspire all of us to do so as well.”  
—Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo da Vinci

“A charming memoir on the joys of solving puzzles and pushing yourself past your so-called limits. It’s not every day that you read a book by an NFL lineman who’s working on a math PhD at MIT, and John Urschel reminds us that a full life depends on exercising both your brain and your body.” 
—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

“John Urschel’s charming autobiography-so-far about his journey through the highest levels of football and mathematics will give you some hope that the ideal of the student-athlete is still alive; and you’ll learn some math, too.”
—Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong

“Meet ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’: John Urschel. Having reached the highest level in football, he’s on his way to doing the same in math. His beautifully written memoir is a fun, fast-paced look at the route to excellence, and a tribute to old-school virtues like hard work, determination, and curiosity.”
—Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics at Cornell University and author of The Joy of x

 

From the Publisher

12/01/2018

Passionate about puzzles, Urschel was auditing college-level calculus courses by age 13. But he also fell for the thrill of football, winning Sullivan and Campbell honors and eventually becoming a Baltimore Ravens defensive lineman. Now off the turf, mathematician Urschel is a PhD candidate at MIT. As he says, "So often, people want to divide the world into two. Matter and energy. Wave and particle. Athlete and mathematician. Why can't something be both?" I'm cheerleading here.

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