Ask John Urschel to define himself, and this is the sort of answer you’ll get: “John Urschel, pro football player, mathematician, professional mathlete.”

To put it mildly, Urschel is a rare commodity. He’s 6 feet 3 inches tall, a 308-pound offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens and a man who once stated matter-of-factly that he loves “hitting people.” But he’s also a 24-year-old with ambitions of obtaining a Ph.D. in mathematics after his football career ends. (Specifically, he hopes to continue his research in numerical partial differential equations and machine learning, if that means anything to you.)

By the look of things, that won’t be impossible. Urschel already holds a master’s degree in mathematics from Penn State, where he earned a 4.0 grade point average. And last December, he and a team of researchers submitted a paper entitled, “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.” The paper was accepted into Journal of Computational Mathematics earlier this year.

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