If I were a professional football player, I would probably spend the off season counting my money and getting lots of massages. Not so John Urschel.
Urschel is an offensive lineman for the Ravens who weighs in at over 313 pounds; he’s also a math genius who publishes papers on subjects such as the “cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems.”
This week, Urschel announced via Twitter that he’d be spending the team’s off season starting coursework for his PhD in philosophy from MIT. The school website lists him as a graduate student in spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning.
The hard knocks to the head that football players often suffer certainly aren’t part of the typical MIT PhD’s study plan. But even after suffering a concussion last August, Urschel kept playing — and kept working out high level math problems.
