This is a survey article featuring some of Wolmer Vasconcelos' contributions to commutative algebra, and explaining how Vasconcelos' work and insights have contributed to the development of commutative algebra and its interaction with other areas to the present. We discuss the Vasconcelos' function and the Vasconcelos' number (v-number for short) of graded ideals and their relation to coding theory, and the interplay of Simis and normal monomial ideals with combinatorial optimization problems, blowup algebras, and resurgence theory. The regularity of subrings of normal k-uniform monomial ideals is shown to be a monotone function, and we give a normality criterion for edge ideals of graphs using Ehrhart rings.