Nationality United States Role Author | Name Samuel Wagstaff, Known for Wagstaff prime | |
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Born February 21, 1945 (age 79)
New Bedford, MA ( 1945-02-21 ) Institutions Purdue University
University of Georgia
University of Rochester Alma mater Cornell University and MIT Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University Fields Mathematics, Computer Science Books The Joy of Factoring, Sums of Squares of Integers, Cryptanalysis of Number Theoretic | ||
Academic advisor Oscar S. Rothaus | ||
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 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 three books. He has an Erdős number of 1.
Wagstaff received his Bachelor of Science in 1966 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation was titled, On Infinite Matroids, Ph.D. in 1970 from Cornell University.
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.