John Urschel: the world’s smartest footballer

MEET the 1.9m, 142kg deep thinker as in touch with destroying the opposition as he is with ridiculously complicated algorithms.

JOHN Urschel resides behind one of the more fitting Twitter handles you can find: “MathMeetsFball”.

The Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman who demolishes Joe Flacco’s would-be sackers for a living moonlights as a mathematician, a 1.9m, 142kg deep thinker as in touch with defensive ends as logarithms.

As other NFL stars shake their heads and promote their brands on Twitter, much of Urschel’s tweets consist of updates on his published mathematical papers and chess exploits.

My paper, A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector..., has been published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics

— John Urschel (@MathMeetsFball) March 18, 2015

Happy Pi Day!!!! Take some time to check out all of its properties and the amazing things it's involved in. My favorite is Euler's identity.

— John Urschel (@MathMeetsFball) March 14, 2015

Hanging out with my buddy Kendal after practice. The kid's a chess wiz!!! pic.twitter.com/hJdmLm2S6c

— John Urschel (@MathMeetsFball) July 30, 2014

His most recent published paper is titled, A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.

Here’s algorithm 2.1 from the paper, which we believe is fairly self-explanatory.

Simple.

The amusing anomaly of a highbrow football player has tread into dark territory recently.

The bruising Urschel, a 23-year-old who was a rookie last season, has found himself increasingly on the defensive.

The long-term horrors of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are being brought to light and players of all ages are rejecting an NFL lifestyle to protect their heads.

Why would such a cognitive outlier continue to risk his oversized brain?

“I play because I love the game,” Urschel wrote on The Players Tribune.

“I love hitting people. There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you.

Urschel says he is “addicted” to hitting people on the field.

“This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else. My teammates, friends and family can attest to this: When I go too long without physical contact I’m not a pleasant person to be around.

“Simply put, right now, not playing football isn’t an option for me. And for that reason, I truly envy Chris Borland.”

Borland, the 24-year-old former 49er, announced he would retire last week because of the long-term effects football can have on the brain.

As Mike Webster’s and Junior Seau’s and Dave Duerson’s and so many others’ horrific stories surface, Urschel is very much aware of the risks to his head, which for him is much more than a weapon used to put defenders on their backs.

Originally published as John Urschel: the world’s smartest footballer