NFL Offensive Lineman by Day, Spectral Graph Theorist by Night

John Urschel is not your ordinary professional football player.

He may be an NFL offensive lineman by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His most recent paper, called "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians", has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that it had been officially accepted for publication. (Based on my googling, the published version of the paper hasn't yet appeared in the journal.)

You can read a draft of Urschel's paper on the arXiv preprint server. I just wish that he used his current affiliation on the paper. That would have been fantastic.

(Tip of the cap to Francis Su.)

Update: Looking at Urschel's academic website, I see that he has prior publications. His website gives the reference for a paper on celestial mechanics. I also checked Mathematical Reviews (to find an upper bound on his Erdős Number, of course), and I see that he also has at least one more paper on spectral graph theory. (This paper isn't listed on Urschel's Penn State website, which I suppose he is no longer updating.)

Update (3/21/15): I wrote a blurb on Urschel for the Improbable Research blog.