When I left college I had no idea what a mathematician did, so I began my career teaching high-school mathematics, then college mathematics. Later, when home with our small children, I was hired part time by Agricultural Research Service to do “some programming” for a few months. Twenty plus years later, I'm still at the Research Center in Pendleton, Oregon. My job has changed over the years. Originally I wrote programs—statistical analysis, curve fitting or data manipulation and storage—for the entire staff. Today, commercial software is available for many of these tasks which allowed me to return to my first love, mathematics. I am part of a team that describes plant and environmental processes mathematically or “models” them as organized patterns of interrelated theories stated as a series of equations. Eventually I program these equations into computer code to simulate environment and growth. We use such mathematical models to communicate our knowledge of processes and interactions between the physical and biological system of the crop and its environment.

A model provides an answer to a problem or question. Once the question is outlined, we read other scientists’ research to become familiar with their published theories; we have “brainstorming” sessions with scientists in various fields of expertise to explore the many aspects of the problem; then many hours are spent making observations and gathering data—weather information, soil information, number and sizes of leaves, plant weight, number of seeds on a head, number of roots, etcetera.