Regular biography
Manuel Blum is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is recognized as a pioneer in theoretical computer science and was awarded the 1995 Turing Award for his contributions to computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking. Blum, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, came to the United States in the mid-1950s to study at MIT. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1964 and joined UC Berkeley in 1968. His research interests include computational complexity, cryptography, and program checking. Blum has supervised the theses of 35 doctoral students, many of whom now hold positions in major computer science departments across the country.