Manuel Blum

Education Blum was born to a Jewish family in Venezuela. Blum was educated at MIT, where he received his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and 1961 respectively. In MIT, he was recommended to Warren S. McCulloch, and they collaborated on some mathematical problems in neural networks. He obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1964 supervised by Marvin Minsky. was also a professor of computer science.

In 2002, Blum was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2006, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to abstract complexity theory, inductive inference, cryptographic protocols, and the theory and applications of program checkers.

In 2018, Blum 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 1960s 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, 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.