John Cameron Urschel (born June 24, 1991) is a Canadian-American mathematician, former professional

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team wi ...

guard Guard or guards may refer to: Professional occupations * Bodyguard, who protects an individual from personal assault * Crossing guard, who stops traffic so pedestrians can cross the street * Lifeguard, who rescues people from drowning * Prison ...

and

center Center or centre may refer to: Mathematics *Center (geometry), the middle of an object * Center (algebra), used in various contexts ** Center (group theory) ** Center (ring theory) * Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentrici ...

and

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...

player. He played college football at Penn State and was drafted by the

Baltimore Ravens The Baltimore Ravens are a professional American football team based in Baltimore, Maryland. The Ravens compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the American Football Conference (AFC) North division. The team plays it ...

in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL Draft. Urschel played his entire NFL career with Baltimore before announcing his retirement on July 27, 2017, at 26 years old. Urschel has bachelor's and master's degrees (both from Penn State) and a doctorate (from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

), all in mathematics. He has published peer-reviewed articles in mathematics.Alexandra Wolfe.
John Urschel: From the NFL to MIT
. ''The Wall Street Journal'', March 3, 2016. Accessed October 30, 2016.Michael S. Rosenwald.

. ''The Washington Post'', October 9, 2016. Accessed October 30, 2016. Urschel is also an advanced stats columnist for ''

The Players' Tribune ''The Players' Tribune'' is a new media platform that produces daily sports conversation and publishes first-person stories from professional athletes. The platform was founded by former professional Major League Baseball player Derek Jeter in ...

''. He is currently serving a three-year term on the

College Football Playoff The College Football Playoff (CFP) is an annual postseason knockout invitational tournament to determine a national champion for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), the highest level ...

selection committee which began in the spring of 2020.

Early life and education

Urschel was born in

Winnipeg Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749, ...

Manitoba , image_map = Manitoba in Canada 2.svg , map_alt = Map showing Manitoba's location in the centre of Southern Canada , Label_map = yes , coordinates = , capital = Winn ...

, Canada. His parents, John Urschel and Venita Parker, were a surgeon and attorney, respectively. He grew up in

Buffalo, New York Buffalo is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New York (behind only New York City) and the seat of Erie County. It is at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of the Niagara River, and is across the Canadian border from Sou ...

where he graduated from

Canisius High School Canisius High School is a Catholic, private college-preparatory school for young men run by the USA Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus in Buffalo, New York, United States, just north of the Delaware Avenue Historic District. Founded in 1 ...

in 2009.Lenzi, Rachel. "Canisius High graduate John Urschel joins College Football Playoff selection committee," ''The Buffalo'' (NY) ''News'', Wednesday, January 22, 2020.
Retrieved December 19, 2022. He earned bachelor's (2012) and master's (2013) degrees in mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. While at Penn State, he was awarded the William V. Campbell Trophy, known as the "academic Heisman".

Professional football career

John Urschel was a player for the Baltimore Ravens. His career lasted from 2014 to 2017.

2014 NFL Draft

Urschel was selected by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL draft with the 175th overall pick. He played in 11 games, starting three, for the Ravens in 2014. He appeared in 16 games, starting seven, for the team in 2015.

Retirement

On July 27, 2017, Urschel announced his retirement from the NFL after three seasons. ''

The Baltimore Sun ''The Baltimore Sun'' is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries. Founded in 1837, it is currently owned by T ...

'' reported that the ''

JAMA ''The Journal of the American Medical Association'' (''JAMA'') is a peer-reviewed medical journal published 48 times a year by the American Medical Association. It publishes original research, reviews, and editorials covering all aspects of biom ...

'' study on the prevalence of

chronic traumatic encephalopathy Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated trauma to the head. The encephalopathy symptoms can include behavioral problems, mood problems, and problems with thinking. The disease often gets worse ...

in deceased players was a factor in Urschel's decision. His retirement as an active player was not the end of his participation in the sport. He was appointed to the

selection committee on January 22, 2020, serving a three-year term which began in the spring of that year.

Mathematics career

While doing his master's at Penn State, Urschel was involved in teaching vector calculus, trigonometry and analytic geometry, and introduction to econometrics. In 2014, Urschel was named Arthur Ashe, Jr. Sports Scholar by ''Diverse: Issues In Higher Education''. In 2015, Urschel co-authored a paper in the ''Journal of Computational Mathematics'' titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians". It includes "a cascadic

multigrid In numerical analysis, a multigrid method (MG method) is an algorithm for solving differential equations using a hierarchy of discretizations. They are an example of a class of techniques called multiresolution methods, very useful in problems exhi ...

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

for fast computation of the

Fiedler vector The algebraic connectivity (also known as Fiedler value or Fiedler eigenvalue after Miroslav Fiedler) of a Graph (discrete mathematics), graph ''G'' is the second-smallest eigenvalue (counting multiple eigenvalues separately) of the Laplacian matr ...

of a graph Laplacian, namely, the

eigenvector In linear algebra, an eigenvector () or characteristic vector of a linear transformation is a nonzero vector that changes at most by a scalar factor when that linear transformation is applied to it. The corresponding eigenvalue, often denoted ...

corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue." Urschel began a Ph.D. in mathematics at

(MIT) in 2016, focusing on spectral graph theory,

numerical linear algebra Numerical linear algebra, sometimes called applied linear algebra, is the study of how matrix operations can be used to create computer algorithms which efficiently and accurately provide approximate answers to questions in continuous mathematic ...

, and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. MIT does not allow Ph.D. students to study part-time; while the Ravens knew that he was taking classes, Urschel admitted after retiring from the team that he did not disclose that he was a full-time graduate student, having taken correspondence classes in between games and practices. On January 4, 2017, Urschel was named to Forbes' " 30 Under 30" list of outstanding young scientists and owns the following blurb: "Urschel has published six peer-reviewed mathematics papers to date and has three more ready for review. He's won academic awards for his math prowess. All this while playing guard for the Baltimore Ravens." Since 2017, Urschel has had an

Erdős number The Erdős number () describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual ...

of 4. His PhD thesis on ''Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems'' was completed in 2021 under Michel Goemans at MIT. He is a member of the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

Awards and honors

* 2013: Senior CLASS Award * 2016–2018: Dean of Science Fellowship * 2017: Forbes’s "30 Under 30" list in science

Papers

* Dhruv Rohatgi, John C. Urschel, Jake Wellens. Regarding Two Conjectures on Clique and Biclique Partitions, Preprint, arXiv:2005.02529. * John C. Urschel, Uniform Error Estimates for the Lanczos Method, Preprint, arXiv:2003.09362. * John C. Urschel, Jake Wellens. Testing k-Planarity is NP-Complete, ''Information Processing Letters'', to appear. * Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Ankur Moitra, Philippe Rigollet, John C. Urschel. Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Determinantal Point Processes, Preprint, arXiv:1701.06501. * John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. Discrete Trace Theorems and Energy Minimizing Spring Embeddings of Planar Graphs, ''Linear Algebra and its Applications'', 2021. * John C. Urschel. Nodal Decompositions of Graphs, ''Linear Algebra and its Applications'', Volume 539, 60-71, 2018. * John C. Urschel. On the Characterization and Uniqueness of Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations, ''SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis'', 55(3), 1525-1547, 2017. * John C. Urschel, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Ankur Moitra, Phillipe Rigollet. Learning Determinantal Point Processes with Moments and Cycles, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2017. * Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Ankur Moitra, Philippe Rigollet, John Urschel. Rates of Estimation for Determinantal Point Processes, Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), 2017. * Xiaozhe Hu, John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. On the Approximation of Laplacian Eigenvalues in Graph Disaggregation, ''Linear and Multilinear Algebra'', 65(9): 1805-1822, 2017. * John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. On the Maximal Error of Spectral Approximation of Graph Bisection, ''Linear and Multilinear Algebra'', 64(10): 1972-1979, 2016. * John C. Urschel, Xiaozhe Hu, Jinchao Xu, Ludmil Zikatanov. A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians, ''Journal of Computational Mathematics'', Volume 33 No. 2, 2015, 209-226. * John C. Urschel, Ludmil T. Zikatanov. Spectral Bisection of Graphs and Connectedness, ''Linear Algebra and its Applications'', Volume 449, 1-16, 2014. * John C. Urschel. A Space-Time Multigrid Method for the Numerical Valuation of Barrier Options, ''Communications in Mathematical Finance'', Volume 2, no. 3, 1-20, 2013. * John C. Urschel, Joseph R. Galante. Instabilities in the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem, ''Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy'', Volume 115, Issue 3, 233–259, 2013

Chess

Urschel competed in the 2015 Pittsburgh Open, finishing in 12th place (tied for 9th) with 3.0 points (+2-1=2) in the Under 1700 rating section. Urschel competes in competitive

online chess Online chess is chess that is played over the Internet, allowing players to play against each other in real time. This is done through the use of Internet chess servers, which often include a system to pair up individual players based on their rat ...

on Chess.com, and he has commentated for Chess.com's BlitzChamps event, a rapid tournament for NFL players.

Personal life

Urschel is married to writer

Louisa Thomas Louisa Thomas (born 1981) is an American writer and sports journalist. Life Thomas is the daughter of journalist and ''Newsweek'' editor Evan Thomas and Washington, D.C. attorney Oscie Thomas. Thomas graduated from Harvard University. She is ...

, whom he met when she was profiling him for

Grantland ''Grantland'' was a sports and pop-culture blog owned and operated by ESPN. The blog was started in 2011 by veteran writer and sports journalist Bill Simmons, who remained as editor-in-chief until May 2015. ''Grantland'' was named after famed e ...

. In 2017, their daughter, Joanna, was born. Urschel's autobiography, ''Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football'', was co-written by Thomas and published in 2019.

References

External links

*
John Urschel's MIT mathematics website
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Urschel, John 1991 births Living people 21st-century American mathematicians American football offensive guards Baltimore Ravens players Canadian players of American football College men's track and field athletes in the United States James E. Sullivan Award recipients Penn State Nittany Lions football players Players of American football from Buffalo, New York Sportspeople from Winnipeg William V. Campbell Trophy winners Gridiron football people from Manitoba