Manuel Blum

Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan-born American computer scientist who received the 1995 ACM Turing Award for his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking. Born to a Jewish family in Venezuela, he studied electrical engineering at MIT and took a doctorate in mathematics in 1964 supervised by Marvin Minsky. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley until 2001 and then Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University until 2018. In the 1960s he developed an axiomatic complexity theory independent of machine models, built on Godel numberings and the Blum axioms, which yields the compression theorem, the gap theorem, the honesty theorem and the Blum speedup theorem. His other work includes coin flipping over a telephone, the median of medians selection algorithm, the Blum Blum Shub generator and CAPTCHAs. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and advised many prominent researchers.