Meet John Urschel, NFL Mathlete and Lover of Graph Laplacians
To simply say that John Urschel is “not your typical NFL player” would be selling him short: Urschel is not your typical mathematician, either.
A two-time All-Big Ten offensive lineman at Penn State, the 300-pound Urschel was taken by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL Draft as a guard, but he’s also working on becoming a center. That would be somewhat fitting – it was only two years earlier that the Ravens’ center was Matt Birk, a Harvard-educated Pro Bowler who might have been the smartest player in the league. Now Urschel is hoping to play the same position, on the same team. And carry the same torch.
He taught a Calculus course at Penn State, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, won the William V. Campbell award in 2013 (also known as the “Academic Heisman”) and this year published a piece in the Journal of Computational Mathematics: A breezy read titled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.”
Forget about saying that five times fast, most people can barely say it one time slow. But Urschel is anything but slow, as we found out during a recent chat with the biggest brain in the NFL. Don’t worry, none of this will be on the midterm.
Your passion for math started much earlier than your passion for football, right?
This is correct. I didn’t start playing football until high school. It came along a little later in life; math is something I’ve done since I can remember. I’m very passionate about math – it’s something I’ve been in love with for a very, very long time.
Why math?
My mother raised me and she would push me towards what I was good at. If she saw that I had a propensity for reading and writing, maybe she would have pushed me towards English. When I was a kid she noticed that I was extremely gifted in math, solving puzzles and pattern recognition, so that’s what she pushed me towards. She used to tell me stories that when I was a little kid, she would go out and buy me these puzzle-type toys, where you have the blocks and you have to put them in the right holes and things like that. She’d get me one of them, take it home, get it out of the box and I’d finish it in about three seconds. I’d be done with it and I’d never touch it again!
How did you get started playing football?
The way I started playing football was that my dad played football at the University of Alberta. He was a great linebacker there, had an opportunity to play in the CFL, ended up going to medical school instead. I just grew up seeing pictures of him playing football and hearing about the stories and I realized that, actually, this is something I wanted to do. Once I started playing I fell in love with the sport.
We often hear that the NCAA’s so-called “student-athletes” struggle, in part because so much of their time is focused on sports. How did you balance earning a master’s degree with playing for one of the premier college football programs?
I didn’t find it difficult, mainly because I didn’t really have any time-management skills; I spent all my time doing either math or football because those were my two loves. That’s all I wanted to do all day, every day. I woke up excited to go lift, excited to go to practice, excited to get into class and learn, excited to do math research. It’s what I wake up and can’t wait to do.