For the fourth time in eight years, a team from Eastern Mennonite University has won the 2022 international Kryptos Codebreaking Competition. The event, hosted by University of Central Washington, attracted the largest field in the history of the contest – 77 teams from across the U.S. and Great Britain.
Senior Hannah Leaman, junior Caleb Hostetler and first-year Mana Acosta solved the three required puzzles in record time. To win, they tapped into their abilities to recognize patterns; apply Baconian and Swagman ciphers and Morse code (Hostetler happens to have learned it for fun while he was in high school); and do some “mad Googling,” the team said.
If you know a little more about their codebreaking resumes, though, this win is not a total surprise.
Leaman, who was awarded the 2022 Outstanding Mathematics Senior Award by EMU faculty, leaves EMU among several talented students who have left their mark in recent years.
This is Leaman’s second Kryptos win; she teamed up with Cameron Byer ‘21 and Ben Stutzman ‘20 to win in 2020 and with Daniel Harder ’20 to take second in 2019.
In 2021, Hostetler (with Byer and Noah Swartendruber) finished in the top six teams; Leaman’s team (with Ike Esh ’22 and Silas Clymer ’21) finished first in the next recognition tier.
Leaman and Hostetler (with Byer) also advanced in 2020 to the International Collegiate Programing Contest’s Mid-Atlantic regionals.
The team of Byer, Harder, and Stutzman also won the entire contest in 2018.
EMU’s first exposure to the contest was in 2014, when they took first and third place. Those teams were also comprised of Harders – brothers Mark ’14 and Aron ’17, who are cousins of Daniel, as well as Byer, who was then a freshman at Eastern Mennonite High School.
Acosta, a first-year engineering major with a computer emphasis, is new to the mix. She experienced a bit of the excitement during a 2021 Honors Weekend visit, which featured an escape room activity created by the EMU Math Club.
That club was “basically a puzzle club,” Leaman and Hostetler explained, and that’s partly the reason for the university’s recent Kryptos success.
“When I came to EMU, there were a lot of students who were really into puzzlehunting and I fit right in,” Leaman said.
Hostetler, one year behind Leaman, ticked off the names of fellow students who also took delight in doing puzzlehunts in their free time, including the famous MIT Mystery Hunt over MLK Day Weekend. (The club also hosts occasional puzzle events, like escape rooms and Puzzlepaloozas for students on campus.)
“I saw the puzzlehunting going on and I thought ‘Alright, these are my people. I need to figure out how to become friends with them,” he said.
The adrenaline rush and intellectual challenge of applying both practical and esoteric knowledge creates tight bonds of friendship.
“I can’t tell you how many 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. calls I’ve been on since coming here,” Leaman said. “A lot of us are still in touch even after graduation doing puzzles. We’ve had teams that included alumni still involved here.”
Many of those students appeared in a 2018 article we creatively titled: “EMU teams place 18th and 48th regionally in international programming contest – and that’s really, really good.”
Participation in the Kryptos contest is entirely voluntary, says professor of mathematics Daniel Showalter, but has benefits beyond the experience of competition.
“Student engagement in self-driven competitions like this make it easy for professors to craft strong recommendation letters,” he added. One result: Leaman will work in leadership at an elite mathematics camp, while Hostetler earned a competitive spot in a funded summer research program at Carnegie Mellon University.
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