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John Urschel: Buffalonian, Baltimore Raven, MIT Math Professor


hondo in seattle

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Urschel grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Canisius, became a Baltimore Raven, and just got a job as a math professor at MIT.  He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems" and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers.  All by the age of 32.  

 

Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.  

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6 minutes ago, hondo in seattle said:

Urschel grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Canisius, became a Baltimore Raven, and just got a job as a math professor at MIT.  He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems" and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers.  All by the age of 32.  

 

Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.  

 

I was an honors math major in college and read briefly the paper.

https://math.mit.edu/~urschel/publications/thesis.pdf

 

I agree with you I did not work hard enough but I got tired of school taking whatever work I could to pay bills.  At one point I was being chased out of lounges for sleeping there and sleeping in office at my job since I had no housing.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/140006

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40 minutes ago, hondo in seattle said:

Urschel grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Canisius, became a Baltimore Raven, and just got a job as a math professor at MIT.  He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems" and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers.  All by the age of 32.  

 

Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.  

 

Very rare for a person to be gifted with elite traits that allow them to reach the pinnacle of their profession in multiple divergent areas...

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5 minutes ago, LabattBlue said:

Let alone understand what it means. 😂

 

If you don't want to read the whole thesis, Urschel provided a short summary:

 

"This thesis considers four independent topics within linear algebra: determinantal point processes, extremal problems in spectral graph theory, force-directed layouts, and eigenvalue algorithms. For determinantal point processes (DPPs), we consider the classes of symmetric and signed DPPs, respectively, and in both cases connect the problem of learning the parameters of a DPP to a related matrix recovery problem. Next, we consider two conjectures in spectral graph theory regarding the spread of a graph, and resolve both. For force-directed layouts of graphs, we connect the layout of the boundary of a Tutte spring embedding to trace theorems from the theory of elliptic PDEs, and we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the popular Kamada-Kawai objective, proving hardness of approximation and structural results regarding optimal layouts, and providing a polynomial time randomized approximation scheme for low diameter graphs. Finally, we consider the Lanczos method for computing extremal eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and produce new error estimates for this algorithm."

 

Typical locker room jock talk.  

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1 hour ago, hondo in seattle said:

Urschel grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Canisius, became a Baltimore Raven, and just got a job as a math professor at MIT.  He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems" and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers.  All by the age of 32.  

 

Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.  

and I never heard of him before today. 

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1 hour ago, hondo in seattle said:

Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.  

 

I'm proud of my CV as it stands, but I also recognize that MIT professors and their ilk are in a totally different league, so I try not to compare myself to them.

 

 

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1 hour ago, hondo in seattle said:

Urschel grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Canisius, became a Baltimore Raven, and just got a job as a math professor at MIT.  He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems" and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers.  All by the age of 32.  

 

Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.  

by that same age Travis Henry had 14 children.

 

this guy hasn't even done that much.

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1 hour ago, hondo in seattle said:

 

If you don't want to read the whole thesis, Urschel provided a short summary:

 

"This thesis considers four independent topics within linear algebra: determinantal point processes, extremal problems in spectral graph theory, force-directed layouts, and eigenvalue algorithms. For determinantal point processes (DPPs), we consider the classes of symmetric and signed DPPs, respectively, and in both cases connect the problem of learning the parameters of a DPP to a related matrix recovery problem. Next, we consider two conjectures in spectral graph theory regarding the spread of a graph, and resolve both. For force-directed layouts of graphs, we connect the layout of the boundary of a Tutte spring embedding to trace theorems from the theory of elliptic PDEs, and we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the popular Kamada-Kawai objective, proving hardness of approximation and structural results regarding optimal layouts, and providing a polynomial time randomized approximation scheme for low diameter graphs. Finally, we consider the Lanczos method for computing extremal eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and produce new error estimates for this algorithm."

 

Typical locker room jock talk.  

To quote the scarecrow…If I only had a brain.  

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And?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

😂

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2 hours ago, hondo in seattle said:

"This thesis considers four independent topics within linear algebra: determinantal point processes, extremal problems in spectral graph theory, force-directed layouts, and eigenvalue algorithms. For determinantal point processes (DPPs), we consider the classes of symmetric and signed DPPs, respectively, and in both cases connect the problem of learning the parameters of a DPP to a related matrix recovery problem. Next, we consider two conjectures in spectral graph theory regarding the spread of a graph, and resolve both. For force-directed layouts of graphs, we connect the layout of the boundary of a Tutte spring embedding to trace theorems from the theory of elliptic PDEs, and we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the popular Kamada-Kawai objective, proving hardness of approximation and structural results regarding optimal layouts, and providing a polynomial time randomized approximation scheme for low diameter graphs. Finally, we consider the Lanczos method for computing extremal eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and produce new error estimates for this algorithm."

That’s what I thought it was about.

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2 hours ago, Big Turk said:

 

Very rare for a person to be gifted with elite traits that allow them to reach the pinnacle of their profession in multiple divergent areas...

 

There actually have been a number of doctors and other people with elite traits who decided to go to NFL first but did not major in basket weaving in college.

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42 minutes ago, Don Otreply said:

And?

 

😂

 

Several years ago, one of my colleagues interviewed for a professor's position at Purdue University. (He and I taught at a community college, and he had a side gig as an engineer because he was a workaholic.) The interviewer asked him about publications and he mentioned the textbook he'd written.

 

Unfazed, the interviewer responded, "So that's just the one textbook?"

 

Then he asked about any other honors of note and my friend said, "I have a patent in my name."

 

Predictably, the interviewer followed up with, "So that's just the one patent?"

 

Sheesh.

 

🙂

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, The Wiz said:

I can't even pronounce the title of his thesis.

 

When I was working on my dissertation, my son came into my office and noticed the title of one of the papers I was reading. He said, "I see you're studying a foreign language."

 

Sometimes it felt that way.

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2 hours ago, WhoTom said:

 

I'm proud of my CV as it stands, but I also recognize that MIT professors and their ilk are in a totally different league, so I try not to compare myself to them.

 

My first submission for publication was when I was 6 years old over 50 years old.  I was reading Scientific American and each issue had one (or more) unsolved problem.  I got a letter back from them "Mr. Host thank you for your submission. We unfortunate publish only first solution.  Dr. xYx and Dr. xYx (do not remember names) submitted solution first. Thank you for your submission and it was actually shorter and more concise than submission published."   They did not even recognize they were sending a letter to a 6 year old kid!

 

I have a paper DISA uses for last 20 years as their standard document for testing and installing guardians (guardians are firewalls used as gateways between connected systems of different security level).

 

I have a patent on OCR licensed by 13 companies which is basis of scanning documents and converting to text.

Apparatus and method of fusing the outputs of multiple intelligent character recognition (ICR) systems to reduce error rate (using fuzzy logic)

I was brought in as system administrator to process hard written documents for government agency to determine best algorithm producing lowest error rate,  While doing this I noticed patterns on failures and I was able to find a way to combine algorithms to radically reduce error rate on tests determining correct letter which neither of original test algorithms could.

 

My issue is not recognition of deeds but the in-between times where I do a lot of drudgery work.

 

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37 minutes ago, Limeaid said:

 

My first submission for publication was when I was 6 years old over 50 years old.  I was reading Scientific American and each issue had one (or more) unsolved problem.  I got a letter back from them "Mr. Host thank you for your submission. We unfortunate publish only first solution.  Dr. xYx and Dr. xYx (do not remember names) submitted solution first. Thank you for your submission and it was actually shorter and more concise than submission published."   They did not even recognize they were sending a letter to a 6 year old kid!

 

I have a paper DISA uses for last 20 years as their standard document for testing and installing guardians (guardians are firewalls used as gateways between connected systems of different security level).

 

I have a patent on OCR licensed by 13 companies which is basis of scanning documents and converting to text.

Apparatus and method of fusing the outputs of multiple intelligent character recognition (ICR) systems to reduce error rate (using fuzzy logic)

I was brought in as system administrator to process hard written documents for government agency to determine best algorithm producing lowest error rate,  While doing this I noticed patterns on failures and I was able to find a way to combine algorithms to radically reduce error rate on tests determining correct letter which neither of original test algorithms could.

 

My issue is not recognition of deeds but the in-between times where I do a lot of drudgery work.

 

What Klein bottle did you fall into on your random walk around the block?
 

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4 hours ago, hondo in seattle said:

 

If you don't want to read the whole thesis, Urschel provided a short summary:

 

"This thesis considers four independent topics within linear algebra: determinantal point processes, extremal problems in spectral graph theory, force-directed layouts, and eigenvalue algorithms. For determinantal point processes (DPPs), we consider the classes of symmetric and signed DPPs, respectively, and in both cases connect the problem of learning the parameters of a DPP to a related matrix recovery problem. Next, we consider two conjectures in spectral graph theory regarding the spread of a graph, and resolve both. For force-directed layouts of graphs, we connect the layout of the boundary of a Tutte spring embedding to trace theorems from the theory of elliptic PDEs, and we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the popular Kamada-Kawai objective, proving hardness of approximation and structural results regarding optimal layouts, and providing a polynomial time randomized approximation scheme for low diameter graphs. Finally, we consider the Lanczos method for computing extremal eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and produce new error estimates for this algorithm."

 

Typical locker room jock talk.  

Nerdddddd!

 

Good for him.. I had a seizure reading that

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