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Baltimore Ravens lineman is a mathematical genius

By Stanford Crissey

Aug 28, 2014; New Orleans, LA, USA; A Baltimore Ravens helmet sits on a box on the sidelines during the second half of their game against the New Orleans Saints at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Mandatory Credit: Chuck Cook-USA TODAY Sports
Aug 28, 2014; New Orleans, LA, USA; A Baltimore Ravens helmet sits on a box on the sidelines during the second half of their game against the New Orleans Saints at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Mandatory Credit: Chuck Cook-USA TODAY Sports /
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Baltimore offensive lineman John Urschel published a ridiculously complicated study of mathematics

John Urschel is not your typical offensive lineman. Sure, he hits people for a living, but that hasn’t stopped him from living out his other passion: math.

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Now if you asked every NFL player what their passion is besides football, it’s highly doubtful that anyone but Urschel would answer “math.” But Urschel, a 23-year-old guard for the Baltimore Ravens, recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. The essay is called “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians” and is billed as “a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue.”

If you don’t understand a word of that, you are in the vast majority; it’s highly advanced stuff, which makes it all the more surprising that Urschel is a football player.

Urschel, a fifth-round draft pick in 2014, has been published in multiple journals of mathematics. He had a 4.0 grade point average at Penn State and also an accomplished chess player.

Urschel’s Twitter handle is “MathMeetsFBall” and, true to its name, its a place where tweets like these…

…stand next to tweets like these:

So why does Urschel, mathematician and chess player, want to play a sport linked to so many dangerous brain injuries? It’s a good question, and one he actually tackled himself in an essay for the Players’ Tribune.

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