Samuel S. Wagstaff, Jr.

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 four 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, PhD 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.

Selected publications with John Brillhart, D. H. Lehmer, John L. Selfridge, Bryant Tuckerman: Factorization of bn ± 1, b = 2,3,5,6,7,10,11,12 up to high powers, American Mathematical Society, 1983, 3rd edition 2002 as electronic book, Online text

Wagstaff The Cunningham Project, Fields Institute, pdf file