Feature: KWU Students Win ‘Meritorious’ Award in Math Competition

This story appears in the Spring/Summer edition of Contact magazine.

Fritz the golden retriever can't catch the treats his owner throws at him. The YouTube videos of him being smacked in the face with pizza, donuts, steak, hot dogs and sliders went viral several years ago.

But why can't Fritz catch?

"Dog Cannot Catch" was the physics/engineering problem in a math modeling competition, the SIMIODE Challenge Using Differential Equations Modeling (SCUDEM), an international contest for college undergraduates.

Three Kansas Wesleyan freshman received a "Meritorious" certificate for their answer. This was the second-best result possible, the competition's equivalent of a silver medal.

Data Science majors Barry Neff Jr., Pensacola, Fla., and Matthew Redden, Gypsum, Kan., along with Physics major Elijah Resano, of the Philippines, won the award with their 10-minute video examining the problem. They looked at it from the point of view of the owner, who would profit from continuing to make the videos with his clumsy dog. Other entries tried to help Fritz out.

"All three worked very hard, even during weekends and holidays," said their coach, Dr. Suman Kundu, assistant professor of Mathematics and Physics. "Considering they are first years, this is a very nice accomplishment indeed."

As first-year students, they hadn't yet had the classes that would teach them how to address the problem, he said.

"They never had a programming course," Kundu said. "Those are skills you learn after coming to college."

One skill they had to hone was organization. Besides adjusting to being first-semester students, keeping up with their courses and learning coding on the fly, the three are busy. Neff is on the men's volleyball team. Redden sings with the Philharmonic Choir and plays saxophone with the Wind Ensemble and The Howl spirit band. He is also on the esports team and captain of the chess club. Resano will be the president of the new STEM Club on campus and is involved with a robotics group off-campus.

Kundu taught them as much advanced calculus and coding as he could before Oct. 19. That's when the physics/engineering SCUDEM problem was revealed and he had to step back.

"It explicitly says you cannot have help from any living being," Neff said, so no more coaching. "That means we couldn't have tested it on a dog, even."

Kundu had no input - and none of the fun of working on the problem - until the team submitted the 10-minute video on Nov. 13.

"It was really hard," he said about not being able to participate. "But at the same time, it was a joy to see them pulling ideas, bouncing them off each other, the way you work in real research."

The team looked at different angles, velocity, distance from the dog and air resistance.

"They had gone through every possibility of doing that with the computer," Kundu said. "They wrote the code for it. They did everything for it in less than a month. They really worked hard on this."

To continue making the Fritz videos, the owner should throw the food at angles between 30 and 40 degrees for the treat to land just short of the dog, the team demonstrated.

"We had absolute zero knowledge how to use the program they offered to us," Redden said. "We had to self-teach."

In the end, they didn't use it.

"Trying something new was what the judges enjoyed," Neff said.

The math was hard and the coding harder, they agreed. But those weren't the most difficult pieces of the competition.

"The biggest problem was putting what was in our heads on paper so other people could understand it," Neff said.

Resano agreed: "In the competition, there is no wrong answer; it was how you present your answer and defend it."

"As much as it's heavy on math, it's more heavy on how well you can be creative," Redden added.

And that was the point, as far as Kundu is concerned.

"As I say to the boys, the end result is not the main goal," he said. "It's the fun you have working with your friends. Teamwork is the most important skill. No research is done single-handedly; you have to have that skill of collaborating with people. You can't do your science alone."

It was a "big surprise" to learn they had earned a Meritorious certificate. The KWU team was competing with experienced teams from all over the world.

"Looking at past years, we saw a lot of names that came back, competing last year and this year," Resano said.

The team credits Kundu and Dr. Kristin Kraemer, chair of the Math and Physics Department with their success.

"Suman played a big role," Resano said.

"He prepared us very well for this competition," said Neff. "As much as he denies it, he put a lot of work into it."

Kraemer also helped prepare the team with books and tips while coaching was permitted.

They are planning to compete again next year and hope to encourage other teams from KWU to compete, too.

Fritz, also, has learned. Eight years on, he finally catches his treats - sometimes.

Story by Jean Kozubowski

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