| Samuel S. Wagstaff, Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1944 (age 67–68) |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Mathematics Computer science |
| Institutions | Purdue University MIT |
| Alma mater | Cornell University |
| Doctoral advisor | Oscar S. Rothaus |
| Doctoral students | Richard Sunseri |
| Known for | Wagstaff prime |
Samuel Standfield Wagstaff, Jr. 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 two books.[2]
Wagstaff received his Bachelor of Science in 1966 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ph.D. in 1970 from Cornell University.[1][3]
In 1980 Wagstaff coauthored with Paul Erdős a paper entitled "The Fractional Parts of the Bernoulli Numbers" in the Illinois Journal of Mathematics, giving him an Erdős number of 1.
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.