Lenore Blum

Lenore Blum (December 18, 1942, New York) is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. Her dissertation was on Generalized Algebraic Structures and her advisor was Gerald Sacks. She then went to the University of California at Berkeley as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics. In 1973 she joined the faculty of Mills College where in 1974 she founded the Mathematics and Computer Science Department (serving as its Head or co-Head for 13 years). In 1979 she was awarded the first Letts-Villard Chair at Mills.

In 1983 Blum won an NSF CAREER award to work with Michael Shub for two years at the CUNY Graduate Center. They worked on secure random number generators and evaluating rational functions, see Blum Blum Shub. In 1987 she spent a year at IBM. In 1989 she published an important paper with Michael Shub and Stephen Smale on NP completeness, recursive functions and universal Turing machines, see Blum–Shub–Smale machine. In 1990 she gave an address at the International Congress of Mathematicians on computational complexity theory and real computation. In 1992 Blum became the deputy director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, otherwise known as MSRI. After visiting the City University of Hong Kong for a year, she moved to her current position at Carnegie Mellon in 1999. [1] In 2002 she was selected to be a Noether Lecturer.

Lenore Blum is married to Manuel Blum and mother of Avrim Blum. All three are MIT alumni and professors of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
Selected Papers

L. Blum, M. Blum and M. Shub, “A Simple Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator,” SIAM Journal of Computing, Vol. 15, No. 2, 364-383, May 1986.
L. Blum, “A New Simple Homotopy Algorithm for Linear Programming I,” Journal of Complexity, Vol.4, No.2, 124-136, June 1988.
L. Blum, M. Shub, S. Smale, “On a Theory of Computation Over the Real Numbers; NP Completeness, Recursive Functions and Universal Machines,” FOCS; 88; Bulletin of the AMS, Vol. 21, No.1, 1-46, July 1989.
L. Blum, F. Cucker, M. Shub and S. Smale, Complexity and Real Computation, Springer-Verlag, 1998.
L. Blum, “Computing over the Reals, Where Turing Meets Newton,” Notices of the AMS, October, 2004.[2]

References

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External links

Lenore Blum's Home Page
"Lenore Blum", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
Lenore Blum from the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive