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Finding the optimal way to use a workforce is not an art — it’s a science. In small groups a missing employee can cause sleepless nights when deadlines approach, while an extra employee can result in missed performance metrics. In large groups, such as Fortune 500 companies, these same problems can cost a company billions of dollars or result in thousands of lost jobs. Management science applies the principles of mathematics to the modern office to streamline processes, cut costs and grow revenue.

This notion of collaborative expertise makes me consider my own profession. I come from an Air Force community culturally dominated by Operations Research, a discipline “employing techniques from other mathematical sciences, such as mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and mathematical optimization” to arrive “at optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex decision-making problems.” This is a relatively young and inherently cross disciplinary field, with all the depth-and-breadth-balance problems that entails, that grew out of efforts by scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, etc., to solve operational problems in World War II. These were, however, experts (in some cases luminaries) in their respective fields, and together they were able to do incredible things that might have been impossible for any subset to accomplish on their own. Social networking is one way to access and connect that kind of expertise.

Swiss-owned Syngenta, which has a major presence in North America, celebrated a major award at Iowa State University Nov. 13 calling for a math revolution in agriculture.

Attended by plant breeders, ag graduate students and college faculty at the Scheman Building on ISU's campus, Syngenta officials explained how it has incorporated advanced analytics into its soybean breeding procedures with assistance from ISU faculty and others.

The team's success won Syngenta the 2015 Franz Edelman Award for achievement in operations research and the management sciences in mid-April.

Joe Byrum feels a little bit like Billy Beane in “Moneyball.”

Beane, for those who don’t follow baseball, was the general manager who put an emphasis on mathematics and advanced technology when putting together his team. He started looking at numbers and changing his approach to the game.

Byrum, head of seeds product development for soybeans at Syngenta, has helped his company to push advanced analytics in the soybean breeding process.

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach,” he said, describing a data-driven analysis approach that helped the company win the 2015 Franz Edelman award presented by the Institute for Operation Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

[Incoming INFORMS Vice President Laura] Albert McLay, a professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, has been using her knowledge of math models and sports analytics to predict which teams are most likely to make the four-team tournament crowning college football’s national champion. She posts the weekly rankings on her blog, Badger Bracketology.

Now in her second year projecting the playoff, McLay says the statistical concepts she uses are some of the same ones she teaches her students in the classroom. She plans to start modeling the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this season.