Lenore Blum

Lenore Blum (December 18, 1942, New York) is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

Blum grew up in New York City and Venezuela. Her mother was a science teacher in a New York City school.

After high school graduation, she studied architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1961 before transferring to Simmons College in Boston to study mathematics, graduating with a B.S. in 1963.

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 a National Science Foundation 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 a 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. In 2002 she was selected to be a Noether Lecturer. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Lenore Blum is married to Manuel Blum and is the mother of Avrim Blum. All three are MIT alumni and professors of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. Lenore has a sister, Harriet Epstein.

• L. Blum, "A Brief History of the Association for Women in Mathematics: The Presidents' Perspectives", from AMS Notices, Vol. 38, No. 7, Sept. 1991, pp. 738–774.
• 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.