Faculty members, graduate students and alumni of NDSU’s mathematics department attended the spring meeting of the American Mathematical Society’s Central Section March 19-20 at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

Faculty members Jason Boynton and Sean Sather-Wagstaff presented their research in the special session on Commutative Ring Theory. Graduate students Ben Anderson, Beth Kubik and Saeed Nasseh also presented in the session, as did NDSU alumnus Chris Spicer who is now a faculty member at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Graduate student Lindsay Erickson presented in a contributed paper session. The graduate students’ talks were based on their dissertation research.

Kubik’s paper was co-written with Micah J. Leamer (University of Nebraska) and Sather-Wagstaff and will appear in the “Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra.” Spicer’s paper was co-written with Jim Coykendall, NDSU professor of mathematics, and will appear in the proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. Nasseh’s paper also was co-written with Sather-Wagstaff and answers a 37-year old question of Vasconcelos.

Coykendall and Sather-Wagstaff also gave research presentations in the ancillary mini-conference on factorization and zero divisor graphs.

NDSU had the largest number of speakers in the special session on commutative ring theory. According to the faculty members in attendance, all the talks from NDSU speakers were well received.