Post by MyW3schools

Blum was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1938. He received his master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) in 1961 from MIT, and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1964 from the same university. His dissertation advisor was Marvin Minsky. He is currently Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Blum developed an original axiomatic approach to computational complexity theory in the 1960s, as opposed to the machine-computability methods that had been used up to that point. His theoretical work turned out to have very extensive concrete applications, yielding theorems such as the compression theorem, the gap theorem, and the Blum speedup theorem. Later, he moved into cryptography, where he developed coin-flipping and other pseudo-random number protocols, as well as the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem — a type of asymmetric-key encryption algorithm — developed with his graduate student, Shafi Goldwasser (see below). More recently still, he was involved in developing CAPTCHAs (the term stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”).