Ravens lineman also a math whiz

Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel has plenty of brawn but isn't exactly lacking in brains, either.

Urschel, who maintained a 4.0 grade point average at Penn State and earned a master's degree in mathematics, recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians."

According to the paper's abstract (the part that's supposed to summarize the complex data into a more easily understandable blurb), Urschel worked on "a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue."

If you understand that, you probably have a master's in math, too.

This is what some of Urschel's work looks like:

So, yeah... He's pretty smart. 

This isn't the first academic paper Urschel has published, which raises the question of why he chooses to toil as a backup to All-Pro guard Marshal Yanda, especially with the possibility that football could permanently damage his brain. 

Urschel attempted to answer that question in a piece titled, "Why I Still Play Football" for The Players' Tribune. 

Basically, he plays because he can't live without the feeling he gets on the field. 

"I love hitting people," he wrote. "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. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else."

Urschel said he envies Chris Borland for being able to step away from the sport of football, but says that simply isn't an option for him right now. 

- With h/t to Bloomberg