Manuel Blum

Manuel Blum (born April 26, 1938, Caracas, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan-born American mathematician and computer scientist and winner of the 1995 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, in “recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking.”

Blum earned a bachelor’s degree (1959) and a master’s degree (1961) in electrical engineering and a doctorate (1964) in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After finishing his studies, Blum joined the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1999 Carnegie Mellon University succeeded in recruiting Blum and his wife, Lenore, from Berkeley’s computer science department. An important motivation for them to leave their professorships at Berkeley was the chance to join their son, Avrim Blum, who had joined Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department in 1991. The parents moved into offices on either side of their son, and all three collaborated on several computer science projects. In particular, they were part of the ALADDIN (algorithm adaptation dissemination and integration) project, which received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation for matching algorithms developed in academia with potential industrial applications.

In 2000 Yahoo! Inc., an American Internet search engine company, contacted the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon for help in distinguishing human and computer visitors to its Web site. Manuel Blum was one of the scientists who took up the challenge, which led to the creation of the CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). As sophisticated computer programs have been developed to discern simply disguised words in CAPTCHAs, Blum and others have continued to experiment with more complex distortions that test the limits of human recognition. In 2018 Blum and his wife resigned from Carnegie Mellon after the latter alleged “professional harassment” and sexism at the university.

Blum was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1988), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2002), and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2006).