Manuel Blum was born on April 26, 1938. He is a computer scientist who was born in Venezuela and is now an American. He received the 1995 ACM Turing Award for his work in the study of how computers solve problems efficiently and how this applies to making secure codes and checking if computer programs are correct.
Education
Blum was born into a Jewish family in Venezuela. He studied at MIT, where he earned his bachelor's degree and master's degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and 1961, respectively. At MIT, he was recommended to Warren S. McCulloch, and they worked together on mathematical problems related to neural networks. In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics, with guidance from Marvin Minsky.
Career
Blum taught as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley until 2001. From 2001 to 2018, he held the Bruce Nelson Professor position at Carnegie Mellon University. His wife, Lenore Blum, also worked as a professor of computer science at the same university during this time.
In 2002, he was chosen to join the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2006, he was selected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his work in abstract complexity theory, inductive inference, cryptographic protocols, and the theory and use of program checkers.
In 2018, Blum and his wife, Lenore, left their jobs at Carnegie Mellon University to protest against sexism. This decision followed a change in management at Project Olympus, which led to unfair treatment of Lenore as its director and excluded other women from participating in project activities.
Research
In the 1960s, he created an axiomatic complexity theory that did not rely on specific computer models. This theory uses Gödel numberings and the Blum axioms. Although it does not depend on machine models, it leads to specific findings such as the compression theorem, the gap theorem, the honesty theorem, and the Blum speedup theorem.
Some of his other contributions include a method for flipping a coin over a telephone, the median of medians (a technique to find the middle value in a list quickly), the Blum Blum Shub pseudorandom number generator, the Blum–Goldwasser cryptosystem, and more recently, CAPTCHAs.
Blum is also recognized for mentoring many well-known researchers. His Ph.D. students include Leonard 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, and Ryan Williams.