A lot of people know John Urschel as an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. What they don't know is that he's also an accomplished mathematician.
Urschel recently published a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics called "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians." He spends his free time conducting math research and playing chess — and demonstrating that the worlds of math and sports are not mutually exclusive.
"I think the message that I'm trying to send is that it's OK to do both. You can do both and be successful," he clarified.
Urschel opened up about balancing math and sports in an interview with NPR. He said that while math has always come easy to him, he's had to put a lot of work into football in order to become really good at it.
Some have expressed concern that one of his interests could be to the detriment of the other, with football posing the risk of brain damage. Urschel has been playing for 10 seasons now and for the 10th time, his mother sat him down for a talk.
Urschel recognizes that he's putting himself at risk by participating in such a high contact sport, but at the same time, he can't stop — calling football (for the lack of a better term) an addiction.
Urschel said he recognizes the concern of family and friends, but what they don't understand is that he's not playing for the money. He's not interested in the social status of being an athlete. He hasn't been brainwashed into thinking that playing football is the manly thing to do.
"I play because I love the game," he said.
Urschel has been playing football since high school. In 2013, he was the first player at Penn State to receive the William V. Campbell Trophy, a distinction given to premier football scholars. He earned a math degree in just three years, going on to get his master's in math within a year — all while maintaining a 4.0 GPA.
Urschel is now working on his second master's in math. He was chosen by the Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL Draft.
