In 1988, Istvan Beck published his paper "Coloring of Commutative Rings", with an introduction expressing the hope that "this idea establishes a connection between graph theory and commutative ring theory which will turn out to be mutually beneficial for these two branches of mathematics." In this talk, we will see just how incredibly successful Beck's hope was by surveying the flood of papers inspired by his idea and the many interesting results they contain. Speaker(s): Jonathan Gerhard (UM)