Manuel Blum | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1938-04-26)26 April 1938 (age 87) Caracas, Venezuela |
| Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS,MS,PhD) |
| Known for | Blum complexity axioms Blum integer Blum's speedup theorem Blum Blum Shub Blum–Goldwasser cryptosystem Blum–Micali algorithm CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA Commitment scheme |
| Spouse | Lenore Blum |
| Awards | ACM's A.M. Turing Award, 1995 Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley, 1977 Sigma Xi's Monie A. Ferst Award, 1991 Herbert A.Simon Teaching award, 2007 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley Carnegie Mellon University |
| Thesis | A Machine-Independent Theory of the Complexity of Recursive Functions (1964) |
| Doctoral advisor | Marvin Minsky[1] |
| Doctoral students | Leonard Adleman Dana Angluin C. Eric Bach Shafi Goldwasser Mor Harchol-Balter Russell Impagliazzo Silvio Micali Gary Miller Moni Naor Ronitt Rubinfeld Steven Rudich Jeffrey Shallit Michael Sipser Umesh Vazirani Vijay Vazirani Luis von Ahn Ryan Williams[1] |
| Website | www |
Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan-born Americancomputer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995[2] "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations ofcomputational complexity theory and its application tocryptography and program checking".[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
Blum was born to aJewish family in Venezuela.[10] Blum was educated atMIT, where he received his bachelor's degree and his master's degree inelectrical engineering in 1959 and 1961 respectively. In MIT, he was recommended toWarren S. McCulloch, and they collaborated on some mathematical problems in neural networks.[11][12][13] He obtained aPh.D. inmathematics in 1964 supervised byMarvin Minsky.[1][8]
Blum worked as a professor of computer science at theUniversity of California, Berkeley until 2001. From 2001 to 2018, he was the Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science atCarnegie Mellon University, where his wife,Lenore Blum,[14] was also a professor of computer science.
In 2002, he was elected to theUnited States National Academy of Sciences. In 2006, he was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering for contributions to abstract complexity theory, inductive inference, cryptographic protocols, and the theory and applications of program checkers.
In 2018, Blum and his wife Lenore resigned from Carnegie Mellon University to protest against sexism after a change in management structure of Project Olympus led to sexist treatment of her as director and the exclusion of other women from project activities.[15]
In the 60s he developed an axiomatic complexity theory which was independent of concrete machine models. The theory is based onGödel numberings and theBlum axioms. Even though the theory is not based on any machine model it yields concrete results like thecompression theorem, thegap theorem, the honesty theorem and theBlum speedup theorem.
Some of his other work includes a protocol forflipping a coin over a telephone,median of medians (a linear timeselection algorithm), theBlum Blum Shubpseudorandom number generator, theBlum–Goldwasser cryptosystem, and more recentlyCAPTCHAs.[16]
Blum is also known as the advisor of many prominent researchers. Among his Ph.D. students areLeonard Adleman,Dana Angluin,Shafi Goldwasser,Mor Harchol-Balter,Russell Impagliazzo,Silvio Micali,Gary Miller,Moni Naor,Steven Rudich,Michael Sipser,Ronitt Rubinfeld,Umesh Vazirani,Vijay Vazirani,Luis von Ahn, andRyan Williams.[1]
