ESP Biography



STEFAN WAGER, Stanford senior studying math



Major: Mathematics

College/Employer: Stanford

Year of Graduation: 2011

Picture of Stefan Wager

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I'm currently a math major at Stanford (senior year). I'm also interested in CS, physics, philosophy, etc. I really like solving puzzles.

If you like thinking about puzzles too, you should try this one:

A princess travels to a faraway land, in the hopes of finding a prince. When she gets to her destination, she finds 3 brothers, all of whom start to court her. She knows from rumor, though, that the middle brother is not a pleasant person, and so decides that she wants to marry either the oldest brother, or the youngest brother.

She also knows that the oldest brother never lies, the youngest brother always lies, and the middle brother might or not might lie. As is customary in these problems, the princess cannot tell which brother is which when she first meets them. And she can only ask one question from one of the brothers, and then must, based on the answer, make her pick.

Can you help the princess come up with a good question?



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

M1286: An introduction to number theory and RSA cryptography in Splash! Spring 2011 (Apr. 16 - 17, 2011)
How can we communicate securely over the internet? How can we send each other encrypted messages without agreeing beforehand on a key with which to encode and decode the messages? Over the course of this class, we will introduce notions about number theory, prove Fermat’s little theorem, and take a peek at one of the most widely used applications of pure mathematics.


M1038: An introduction to number theory and RSA cryptography in Splash! Fall 2010 (Nov. 13 - 14, 2010)
How can we communicate securely over the internet? How can we send each other encrypted messages without agreeing beforehand on a precise way to encode and decode the messages? Over the course of this class, we will introduce notions about number theory, prove Fermat's little theorem, and take a peek at one of the most widely used applications of pure mathematics.