Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan-American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of

computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved ...

and its application to

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adv ...

and program checking".

Education

Blum was born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in Venezuela. Blum was educated at MIT, where he received his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in 1959 and 1961 respectively, and his Ph.D. in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

in 1964 supervised by

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory ...

Career

Blum worked as a professor of computer science at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

until 2001. From 2001 to 2018, he was the Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, where his wife,

Lenore Blum Lenore Carol Blum (née Epstein, born December 18, 1942) is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made pioneering contributions to the theories of real number computation, cryptography, and pseudorandom number generation. She ...

, was also a professor of Computer Science. In 2002, he was elected to the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the N ...

. In 2006, he was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

for contributions to abstract complexity theory, inductive inference, cryptographic protocols, and the theory and applications of program checkers. In 2018 he 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.

Research

In the 60s he developed an axiomatic complexity theory which was independent of concrete machine models. The theory is based on

Gödel numbering In mathematical logic, a Gödel numbering is a function that assigns to each symbol and well-formed formula of some formal language a unique natural number, called its Gödel number. The concept was developed by Kurt Gödel for the proof of h ...

s and the Blum axioms. Even though the theory is not based on any machine model it yields concrete results like the compression theorem, the gap theorem, the honesty theorem and the Blum speedup theorem. Some of his other work includes a protocol for flipping a coin over a telephone, median of medians (a linear time

selection algorithm In computer science, a selection algorithm is an algorithm for finding the ''k''th smallest number in a list or array; such a number is called the ''k''th '' order statistic''. This includes the cases of finding the minimum, maximum, and medi ...

), the Blum Blum Shub pseudorandom number generator, the

Blum–Goldwasser cryptosystem The Blum–Goldwasser (BG) cryptosystem is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm proposed by Manuel Blum and Shafi Goldwasser in 1984. Blum–Goldwasser is a probabilistic, semantically secure cryptosystem with a constant-size ciphertext expa ...

, and more recently CAPTCHAs.Von Ahn, Luis; Blum, Manuel; Hopper, Nicholas J.; Langford, John (May 2003).
CAPTCHA: Using Hard AI Problems for Security
. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques (EUROCRYPT 2003). Blum is also known as the advisor of many prominent researchers. Among his Ph.D. students are Leonard Adleman, Dana Angluin, Shafi Goldwasser, Mor Harchol-Balter, Russell Impagliazzo,

Silvio Micali Silvio Micali (born October 13, 1954) is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand. Micali's research centers on cryptography and information security. In 2012, he received ...

, Gary Miller, Moni Naor, Steven Rudich, Michael Sipser, Ronitt Rubinfeld, Umesh Vazirani, Vijay Vazirani, Luis von Ahn, and Ryan Williams.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blum, Manuel American computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists 1938 births Living people Jewish American scientists International Association for Cryptologic Research fellows Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Turing Award laureates Carnegie Mellon University faculty UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Venezuelan emigrants to the United States Venezuelan Jews Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists MIT School of Engineering alumni

Education

Career

Research

See also

References