John Urschel, an offensive lineman with the Baltimore Ravens, may be the biggest math whiz in the NFL — and that includes people in the front office, too — after the player had a paper published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics recently.
The Penn State graduate started three games last year during his rookie season with the Ravens after earning All-American honors at the Big Ten school (on top of a 4.0 GPA).
According to Bloomberg, Urschel took to Twitter Wednesday not to boast about his play, but about his paper, titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians."
Urschel earned his math degree from Penn State in three years and his master's degree in math in
one year, according to his official Baltimore Ravens biography.
The two-time Academic All-American also taught trigonometry, analytic geometry, and integral vector calculus at Penn State in 2013.
He's also been published on more than once occasion. In 2012, the offensive lineman authored a piece for the science publication Celestial Mechanics and Dynamic Astronomy.
For all of Urschel's smarts, he wrote in the Players Tribune last week that he is also very much a football player and still loves smashing into people.
"I play because I love the game," he wrote, contrasting his experience with rookie Chris Borland, who retired after one year with the San Francisco 49ers because he feared head injuries.
"I love hitting people. 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 . . . My teammates, friends, and family can attest to this: When I go too long without physical contact I'm not a pleasant person to be around," Urschel wrote.
"This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running, and position-specific drill work. I've fallen in love with the sport of football and the physical contact associated with it."
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