Applied mathematics Ph.D. student Dane Wilburne has won a travel award to attend the 2017 Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry (AG17) July 31–August 4 at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Wilburne will give the talk “Random Commutative Algebra,” about work he has done with Jesus De Loera, professor of mathematics, University of California, Davis; and Chris O’Neill, assistant professor of mathematics at UC Davis. Wilburne’s Ph.D. advisor is Sonja Petrović, assistant professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Tech.

A numerical semigroup is a subset of the natural numbers that contains zero and is closed under addition. Numerical semigroups have been studied for over 150 years and have connections to number theory, combinatorics, commutative algebra, and algebraic geometry. In his talk, Wilburne will introduce a model for randomly generating numerical semigroups, present some results that describe the structure of numerical semigroups arising from the model, and provide some motivation for studying numerical semigroups from a probabilistic perspective.