Manuel Blum

Manuel Blum
Born	April 26, 1938 (1938-04-26) (age 73) Caracas, Venezuela
Residence	Pittsburgh, United States
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley Carnegie Mellon University
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Marvin Minsky
Doctoral students	Leonard Adleman Dana Angluin C. Eric (Carl) Bach William Evans Peter Gemmell John Gill, III Shafrira Goldwasser Mor Harchol-Balter Diane Hernek Nicholas Hopper Russell Impagliazzo Sampath Kannan Silvio Micali Gary Miller Moni Naor Rene Peralta Ronitt Rubinfeld Steven Rudich Troy Shahoumian Jeffrey Shallit Michael Sipser Elizabeth Sweedyk Umesh Vazirani Vijay Vazirani Hal Wasserman Luis von Ahn Ryan Williams
Notable awards	Turing Award

Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938 in Caracas, Venezuela) is a computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking".^[1]

Biography

Blum attended MIT, where he received his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in EECS in 1959 and 1961 respectively, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1964 under professor Marvin Minsky.^[2]

He worked as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley until 1999.^[3] In 2002 he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.^[3]

He is currently the Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where his wife, Lenore Blum, and son, Avrim Blum, are also professors of Computer Science.

Work

In the 60s he developed an axiomatic complexity theory which was independent of concrete machine models. The theory is based on Gödel numberings 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 celebrated Blum speedup theorem.

Some of his other work includes a protocol for flipping a coin over a telephone, a linear time Selection algorithm, the Blum Blum Shub pseudorandom number generator, the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem, and more recently CAPTCHAs.

His PhD Advisees, with unusual frequency, have gone on to very distinguished careers. Among them are Leonard Adleman, Shafi Goldwasser, Russell Impagliazzo, Silvio Micali, Gary Miller, Moni Naor, Steven Rudich, Michael Sipser, Umesh and Vijay Vazirani, Ronitt Rubinfeld, Luis von Ahn, and Ryan Williams.

See also

• Blum complexity axioms
• Blum's speedup theorem
• Blum Blum Shub
• Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem

References

1. ^ ACM Turing Award Citation, retrieved 2010-01-24.
2. ^ Manuel Blum at the Mathematics Genealogy Project..
3. ^ ^{a b} Honored professor stumps computers, Jonathan Potts, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, May 16, 2002.

External links

Blum's home pages:

• Carnegie Mellon page
• Berkeley page (outdated)

Persondata
Name	Blum, Manuel
Alternative names
Short description	Computer scientist
Date of birth	1938-4-26
Place of birth	Caracas, Venezuela
Date of death
Place of death