Background
Blum grew up in New York City and Venezuela. Her mother was a science teacher in a New York City school.
mathematician university professor
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 Bachelor of Surgery in 1963. She received her Doctor of Philosophy 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.
They worked on secure random number generators and evaluating rational functions. See Blum Blum Shub. In 1987 she spent a year at International Business Machines Corporation. In 1989 she published a paper with Michael Shub and Stephen Smale on Natural Philosophy 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. L. L. L. L. L. L.
American Mathematical Society.