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Kate Murphy writes at NYT about 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". "I have a Bachelor's and Master's in mathematics, all with a 4.0, and numerous published papers in major mathematical journals."
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 he 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."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @04:24PM
Neither. As a theologian, he was probably aware of the paradox of efficiency, or the hedonist's paradox. That is, the more effort you put into getting something the less likely you are to get it. Note that people who try to be happy the most tend to rarely actually be happy. For any goal to be achieved a necessary and sufficient amount of effort should be put towards the task and not one bit more, lets the paradox.
Newton was likely to be aware of this, Einstein not so much. Of course Einstein was indeed more specialized, thus having achieved so greatly without hitting the wall appears impressive. Then again most of Einstein's most memorable work was done when he too was going after multiple pursuits.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 13 2015, @12:13AM
He write four papers of historical importance all at once, with a fifth being his derivation of E=mC^2, as a followup to his paper on relativity. The other papers were on the photoelectric effect, for which he won the nobel, a statistical study of brownian motion, which proved that atoms really do exist as well as one other whose topic escapes me just now.
But all he hoped to get out of pulling those first four papers right out of his ass was a raising pay. He was a clerk for the swiss patent office you see, and patent examiners who had doctorates were paid more than examiners who did not. He was hoping to get one of those four papers accepted as his dissertation.
At Caltech, some of the physics students were completely excused from the laboratory requirements, typically because they were so clumsy or clueless that they destroyed lab equipment. I don't really know but I expect that was the case for Einstein, when he was an undergraduate.
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