Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr.

Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr.
Born (1945-02-21) February 21, 1945 (age 79)
Nationality United States
Alma materCornell University and MIT
Known forWagstaff prime
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Computer science
InstitutionsPurdue University
University of Georgia
University of Rochester
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Samuel Standfield Wagstaff Jr. (born 21 February 1945) is an American mathematician and computer scientist, whose research interests are in the areas of cryptography, parallel computation, and analysis of algorithms, especially number theoretic algorithms. He is currently a professor of computer science and mathematics at Purdue University[1] who coordinates the Cunningham project, a project to factor numbers of the form bn ± 1, since 1983. He has authored/coauthored over 50 research papers and four books.[2] He has an Erdős number of 1.[3]

Wagstaff received his Bachelor of Science in 1966 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation was titled, On Infinite Matroids, PhD in 1970 from Cornell University.[1][4]

Wagstaff was one of the founding faculty of Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue, and its precursor, the Computer Operations, Audit, and Security Technology (COAST) Laboratory.

  1. ^ a b "Purdue University - Department of Computer Science - Samuel S. Wagstaff". www.cs.purdue.edu.
  2. ^ "Selected Publications of Sam Wagstaff". homes.cerias.purdue.edu.
  3. ^ Paul Erdős; Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr. (Spring 1980). "The Fractional Parts of the Bernoulli Numbers" (PDF). Illinois Journal of Mathematics. 24 (1): 104–112. doi:10.1215/ijm/1256047799.
  4. ^ Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr. at the Mathematics Genealogy Project