🌅 This Ex-NFL Lineman Is a Mathematician

SOURCE

John Urschel (2026)

WHAT TO KNOW

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor John Urschel released a new paper this week titled On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices, aiming to solve a problem that has eluded mathematicians for the past 30 years. Urschel isn’t only a math whiz, he’s also a former NFL offensive lineman who spent three years playing for the Baltimore Ravens. After ditching pro football for pro math in 2017, Urschel spent four years earning his PhD at MIT—he actually enrolled in the program while still a member of the Ravens’ active roster—returning to campus two years later as a full-time professor. Urschel is also one of the namesakes of the Urschel-Zikatanov Theorem, which uses spectral graph theory to examine connectedness within networks.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Urschel’s paper deals with Gaussian elimination, which, without getting lost in the weeds, is a fast, systematic way computers work through equations with millions of variables. The method is used by computer programs in nearly all fields to solve large systems of equations, powering things like online search results, weather forecasting, financial systems, video game engines, and more. The issue is that small rounding errors using the algorithm can theoretically compound to eventually make answers useless. Mathematicians had long suspected the math would hold, though none could prove it until Urschel, who used AI to find the algorithm is close to 100% reliable. Urschel’s paper was published as a preprint, meaning it has yet to be peer reviewed.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• On Tuesday, OpenAI published a repository with more than 300 results the company claims resolve or make significant progress on major open questions in mathematics. Mathematicians will spend the next several months parsing through the data to determine if the results are correct or valuable. The release comes about a month after OpenAI announced its models had solved the Navier-Stokes equation, a notoriously difficult Millennium Prize Problem. Millennium Problems are considered so difficult that a $1 million reward is offered for each solution.