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PROBLEM SOLVER The Nittany Lions know they can count on John Urschel in 2013 | et's be honest. Most of us don't give much thought to the nature of the universe. The things we don't know about celestial mechanics would fill a library, and the things we do know come not from Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson but from Han and Chewie. We know that flying through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops. We know that the Millennium Falcon once made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Other than that? We got nothin'. It's a good thing, then, that there are people with a thorough grasp of physics and mathematics and an understanding of the cosmos that goes deeper than a few random "Star Wars" quotes. People like John Urschel, for instance. As a graduate student in math and a starting guard on the Penn State football team, Urschel has been doing a lot of heavy lifting these past few years, intellectually and otherwise. He recently co-authored a paper titled "Instabilities in the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem" that was accepted for publication by the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. As the title suggests, it's not light reading. Most nonscientists are likely to drift off by the top of page two, wherein Urschel and co-author Joseph R. Galante "consider the system in a rotating frame of reference which rotates with unit speed in the same direction as Jupiter." Got that? If not, here's the oversimplified version, as described by Urschel himself to a group of blank-faced reporters in the Beaver Stadium media room following Penn State's seasonending victory over Wisconsin: "I proved that orbits of asteroids could eventually be perturbed to cross Mars' orbit – the L JOHN URSCHEL "We need to carry on the tradition and keep this Penn State family together. And I think we will." perturbation of the effect of Jupiter on the asteroids." Asteroid perturbation is not typical postgame fare at Penn State, in case you were wondering. Over the years, the Nittany Lions have had very little to say about the state of the solar system, and they were conspicuously silent in 2006 when Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a mere Kuiper Belt object. But with Urschel, anything is fair game. His Twitter handle – @mathmeetsfball – could hardly be more appropriate. He's a 4.0 student who collected his undergraduate degree before even beginning his junior football season and he's also a first-team All-Big Ten offensive guard, having been honored by the conference earlier this month after helping the Nittany Lions finish fourth in the league in total offense. Bill O'Brien was certainly happy to have inherited such a multifaceted player when he arrived on campus last winter. "What a fantastic kid," the firstyear coach gushed after watching Urschel grade out at 90 percent in Penn State's Big Ten opener against Illinois. "What a great guy to be around. That's why you want a job like this, because you have a chance to coach and be around guys like that. Here is a guy who's a 4.0 math major at Penn State. He's just a tough guy, has great flexibility, very smart, very instinctive. Really just what Penn State is all about." Urschel started every game for the Nittany Lions at right guard this past season and is one of three offensive line starters slated to return in 2013. The others are sophomore tackle Donovan Smith and guard Miles Dieffenbach. A 6-foot-3, 307-pounder from upstate New York, Urschel knows it's his turn to step into a leadership role. "There's a little bit of pressure to do that," he said. "But we all lead in our own ways. As a senior class, we'll start working, start preparing to get this new 2013 team ready for next year." O'Brien talked a lot this past fall about the leadership that Penn State got from this year's senior class. But along the way, he also watched some of the team's juniors mature. "I've definitely seen junior leadership show up," he said, citing the stretch lines before games this year in which the seniors faced the rest of the team as they loosened up. "The first row that faces our seniors is mostly made up of juniors, and so I look at those guys every day and I say those are the guys who are going to be the leaders of this football team next year with the addition of other players, like Allen Robinson and Kyle Carter. I do see

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