Residence Pittsburgh Spouse Lenore Blum Fields Computer Science Doctoral advisor Marvin Minsky | Name Manuel Blum Children Avrim Blum Role Computer scientist | |
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Born April 26, 1938 (age 85)
Caracas, Venezuela ( 1938-04-26 ) Institutions University of California, Berkeley
Carnegie Mellon University Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thesis A Machine-Independent Theory of the Complexity of Recursive Functions (1964) Doctoral students Doctoral
students
Leonard Adleman
Dana Angluin
C. Eric Bach
William Evans
Peter Gemmell
John Gill, III
Shafi 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
Ivan da Costa Marques Notable students Luis von Ahn, Silvio Micali, Shafi Goldwasser Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1964) Similar People Lenore Blum, Luis von Ahn, Silvio Micali, Shafi Goldwasser, Avrim Blum | ||
Manuel blum towards the design of an automated physicist
Manuel Blum (Caracas, 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan 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".
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Education
Blum was educated at 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 supervised by Marvin Minsky.
Career
He worked as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley until 1999. In 2002 he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
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.
Research
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 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), the Blum Blum Shub pseudorandom number generator, the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem, and more recently CAPTCHAs.
Blum is also known as the advisor of many prominent researchers. Among his Ph.D. students are Leonard Adleman, Shafi Goldwasser, Russell Impagliazzo, Silvio Micali, Gary Miller, Moni Naor, Steven Rudich, Michael Sipser, Ronitt Rubinfeld, Umesh Vazirani, Vijay Vazirani, Luis von Ahn, and Ryan Williams.