# Manuel Blum

### Research Areas

- recursive function, cryptographic protocols, program checking

## Biography

Manuel Blum is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and the winner of the 1995 Turing

Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its

applications to cryptography and program checking, a mathematical approach to writing programs that

check their work.

He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, where his parents settled after fleeing Europe in the 1930s, and

came to the United States in the mid-1950s to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While

studying electrical engineering, he pursued his desire to understand thinking and brains by working in the

neurophysiology laboratory of Dr. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, then concentrated on

mathematical logic and recursion theory for the insight it gave him on brains and thinking. He did his

doctoral work under the supervision of Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, and earned a

Ph.D. from MIT in mathematics in 1964.

Blum began his teaching career at MIT as an assistant professor of mathematics and, in 1968, joined the

faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He became the Bruce Nelson University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon in 2001. Blum has supervised the theses of 35 doctoral students who now pepper almost every major computer science department in the country. The many ground-breaking areas of theoretical computer science chartered by his academic descendants are legend.

## Education

- 1964, Ph.D., Mathematics, MIT
- 1961, M.S., Electrical Engineering, MIT
- 1959, B.S., Electrical Engineering, MIT

## Selected Publications

- L. von Ahn, M. Blum, and J. Langford, "Telling humans and computers apart automatically: How lazy cryptographers do AI," Communications of the ACM, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 56-60, Feb. 2004.
- L. von Ahn, M. Blum, N. J. Hopper, and J. Langford, "CAPTCHA: Using hard AI problems for security," in Lecture Notes in Computer Science -- Advances in Cryptology, E. Biham, Ed., Vol. 2656, Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 2003, pp. 294-311.
- H. Wasserman and M. Blum, "Software reliability via run-time result-checking," J. ACM, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 826-849, Nov. 1997.
- M. Blum and H. Wasserman, "Reflections on the Pentium division bug," IEEE Trans. Computers, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 385-393, April 1996.
- M. Blum, M. G. Luby, and R. A. Rubinfeld, "Self-testing/correcting with applications to numerical problems," in Proc. 22nd Annual ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing, H. Ortiz, Ed., New York, NY: ACM Press, 1990, pp. 73-83.
- M. Blum and S. K. Kannan, "Designing programs that check their work," in Proc. 21st Annual ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing, D. S. Johnson, Ed., New York, NY: ACM Press, 1989, pp. 86-97.
- M. Blum, P. Feldman, and S. Micali, "Non-interactive zero-knowledge and its applications (Extended abstract)," in Proc. 20th Annual ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing, New York, NY: ACM Press, 1988, pp. 103-112.
- L. Blum, M. Blum, and M. Shub, "A simple unpredictable pseudo-random number generator," SIAM J. Computing, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 364-383, May 1986.
- M. Blum and S. Micali, "How to generate cryptographically strong sequences of pseudo-random bits," SIAM J. Computing, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 850-864, Nov. 1984.
- M. Blum, "Coin flipping by telephone -- A protocol for solving impossible problems," ACM SIGACT News, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 23-27, Dec. 1983.
- M. Blum, "How to exchange (secret) keys," ACM Trans. Computer Systems, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 175-193, May 1983.
- M. Blum and D. Kozen, "On the power of the compass (or, Why mazes are easier to search than graphs)," in Proc. 19th Annual Symp. on Foundations of Computer Science, New York, NY: IEEE, 1978, pp. 132-142.
- L. Blum and M. Blum, "Toward a mathematical theory of inductive inference," Information and Control, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 125-155, June 1975.

## Awards, Memberships and Fellowships

- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, 1999
- Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching Computer Science, 1999
- ACM A.M. Turing Award, 1995
- Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lecturer, 1995
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member, 1995
- Monie A. Ferst Award, 1991
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, 1983
- Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow, 1982
- UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, 1977
- Sloan Research Fellow, 1972