A very interesting article about the story of John Urschel going pro in the field of Mathematics.
OT: John Urschel Goes Pro
- Thread starter francofan
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Jim, I copied the address of this article and posted it on my Facebook page. Think it is a well written article and John definitely is an awesome person!
I was a math major at PSU. This comment in the article caught my eye.
"We say things, or write them down, in order to see if they feel true. We say it and then we think about it. And whatever’s slightly not right, we circle back and revise, making more precise, shaving off the parts that don’t pass inspection. It’s our process in math and it leaks out into the way we talk about our desks and our lives."
This seems to explain why I can't stop myself from constantly going back and editing my posts - even if it's as unimportant as adding or subtracting a comma. It's my math personality leaking out.
I have a dream. A dream John comes back to Penn State. That someone endows a professor seat in his name. That he comes home and begins a career in the math department and eventually leads to a path of him being a President of PSU.
It’s a good dream. I have a good size check if anyone wants to start the fundraising to endow a chair.
It’s a good dream. I have a good size check if anyone wants to start the fundraising to endow a chair.
Nope. I don't remember very many of my professors at all. My advisor was Don Rung. Other than him, I really don't remember anyone.
Bert Yood was my advisor. He was a small man with a remarkable resemblance to Albert Einstein, in his late fifties when I was at PSU. Anyway, when I started grad school at Tennessee I sat down with my advisors to figure out at what level I should start. They were pleasant enough, but when they saw my Analysis notebook with Yood's name on the cover, they said to each other, simultaneously, I swear, "He had Yood!" It was as if I told them I took physics with Richard Feynman. They ended up putting me in an analysis class that was a little over my head and I got my ass kicked, in a good way.
When I got my doctorate, I wrote Yood to thank him and he wrote back. He was around eighty at that time and included a couple of preprints of his work. I still have the letter. I'm glad I wrote him; he deserved to know how much help he was to me.
I've been very lucky with the teachers I ended up with, Yood, Irish Herb and Bob Johnson at Gallaudet, Dave Anderson, Bob Daverman, and Sam Jordan at Tennessee, Kevin Coombes and, especially, Mike Boyle at Maryland. Terrific teachers, terrific men. I've been very lucky.
I just checked his bio. He was at Oregon when I was in the math program here so I wouldn't have been aware of him.
