News Room

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.

What does preliminary information say about the crash of the passenger jet flying over the Sinai Peninsula? Was there an explosive device? INFORMS Treasurer Sheldon Jacobson, an aviation security expert, discusses the possibilities in this streaming video interview.