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".
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.
He worked as a professor of computer science at the University of
California, Berkeley until 1999 [1].
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, Moni Naor, Steven
Rudich, Michael Sipser, Umesh and Vijay Vazirani, and Luis von Ahn.
See also
Blum complexity axioms
Blum's speedup theorem
Blum Blum Shub
Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem |