In 2014, the Baltimore Ravens drafted Belmont resident John Urschel, a Canadian-born, Buffalo-raised Penn State graduate. For three seasons, he played football as an offensive lineman in the NFL.
But before the professional football career, Urschel was a kid who spent time on both sides of the Canadian-American border, enjoyed puzzles, and did well — “quite well,” in fact — at math.
“If someone in the school forgot to do their homework, and it’s 10 minutes before homeroom starts, they’re running around [asking] ‘Where’s John, where’s John?,’” Urschel recalled, laughing.
After three seasons, at the age of 26, Urschel retired, choosing instead to focus on his Ph.D. studies, his fiancée, and the child they were expecting. Managing a professional football career while taking doctoral classes at MIT was becoming unsustainable.
“It was too much. I would recommend this to no one,” he said. “Also, I found I was really enjoying my time at MIT. Every time I’d have to leave, I’d be a little sadder. I still loved football, but when it lowers to maybe the third most important thing in your life, that’s a little too low given how serious, serious of a commitment it is.”
In addition to his busy schedule, becoming a father led him to consider his health and longevity more. He wanted to be able to walk in the future, to attend his kids’ weddings. The risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was “definitely” a factor in his retirement decision.
“It was an amazing sport for me,” he said. “My best friends in the world are guys I played with in college. Playing in the league was so much fun. … But I feel like football has this place in our culture that maybe a bit extreme at times. In some places, there’s this idea that if you’re an able-bodied young man, football is the thing you should be playing. Football is a serious, serious violent sport. I was a rambunctious kid; I loved getting on the field running around, taking part in some consensual violence.”
Urschel’s decision to retire came just as attention was turning to the prevalence of CTE in the sport. In a recent Boston University-led study, researchers estimatedthat nearly 75% of all NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 had signs of CTE. In individuals with CTE, symptoms can include memory loss, aggression, and poor impulse control. Right now, there is no way to diagnose the condition until after death.
Now, the football player-turned mathematician is in his fourth year as a professor at MIT, teaching numerical forces and computational math. This year, he drew the attention of researchers and peers in his field by solving a decades-old question concerning a centuries-old algorithm, known as Gaussian elimination.
“It’s an algorithm that’s really fundamental and really, really important—so fundamental and important it probably gets used trillions to quadrillions of times a day,” he said.
Urschel said his discovery helped prove the algorithm’s accuracy.
Understanding the Why
As a kid, Urschel said he “sort of neglected” math — the class wasn’t necessarily his favorite part of the school day.
Still, he felt pressure from people who thought he should focus his efforts on one talent rather than the other.
“In all honesty, it’s a very natural thing,” he said. “When you’re good at something … oftentimes people around you want the best for you… So yeah, I had people who weren’t necessarily telling me to stop playing football but…didn’t think going to Penn State was a good decision for me, because I had other options where football was a little less serious but academics had a little more of a focus. I could have gone to Princeton for football, or some other places, but I really wanted to play football in a big town, in a major place.”
As a student at Penn State — where he first majored in aerospace engineering, following his mother’s advice — his interest in math was piqued.
“I liked all my math classes best,” he said. “I found in college my instructors really focused on this question of ‘Why?’ … that I found wasn’t emphasized as much when I was in [high] school. This was an approach I really took to. I didn’t know what I could do with a math major, I just knew I wanted to keep taking math classes.”
From there, he was introduced to math research, and “the rest is history.” While at Penn State, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics. In 2021, he finished his doctoral degree in mathematics.
“What I’ve been studying is properties of this algorithm that despite being over 2,000 years old, being taught to high schoolers, and being used by just about everyone who is doing some linear algebraic computation, is not fully understood,” he said.
Also in the last decade, Urschel has tried to come up with a response to another big question: Does he see an overlap between math and football? Despite his best efforts to come up with answers that might satisfy, the truth is, no; he (mostly) doesn’t. For Urschel, they’re just two unique, “very different” interests of his.
“I like using my brain, solving problems, and trying to understand complicated things that are not obvious to me at first glance,” he said. “I think we all like problem-solving to some extent, whether it’s doing a crossword or doing a Sudoku puzzle. I would just say I like it to an 11 (on a scale of 1-10); most people might like at a three or four. I just want to spend all my days doing puzzles.”