Person: Blum, Lenore
Lenore Blum is an American mathematician who has made important advances in computer science.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- However, to avoid confusion we shall refer to her as Blum throughout this article.
- After a year Rose took a teaching post in the American School Escuela Campo Alegre in Caracas and this provided sufficient money to allow Lenore to attend junior school and then high school in Caracas.
- He left Caracas while Lenore was still at school there and went to the United States where he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Returning to the United States, Lenore applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology both because it was an excellent place for her to study and also since Manuel was there, but she was not accepted.
- After two years at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Blum transferred in 1961 to Simmons College in Boston to study mathematics.
- Over many years Blum has championed increased participation of women and girls in mathematics and has been actively engaged in promoting this cause through different organisations.
- In addition to these organisations, Blum is also a member of the American Mathematical Society, serving on its Council and she also as Vice President of the Society in 1990 - 1992.
- We should now discuss Blum's impressive contributions to research.
- Blum's next important paper was Differentially closed fields: a model-theoretic tour which appeared in 1977 and, for the first time, made accessible some results she had found ten years earlier and included in her thesis.
- The 1980s, however, saw Blum make a major decision to devote herself exclusively to research.
- After this Blum served as Deputy Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley from 1992 to 1997.
- Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s Blum, with several co-authors, has developed new directions in the theory of computation and complexity.
- An important first contribution was Blum's 1989 paper Lectures on a theory of computation and complexity over the reals (or an arbitrary ring) which extended the theories of computation and computational complexity from the standard discrete situation to study how these ideas can be developed in continuous domains such as the real number system.
- In the same year Blum was invited to address the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, Japan, on these new theories.
- The first textbook on this important new area was Complexity and Real Computation published in 1998 jointly by Blum, Steve Smale, Mike Shub, and Felipe Cucker.
- Blum spent the academic years 1996-98 as Visiting Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong.
- As well as continuing to develop her important ideas in research, Blum helped to undertake a revamping of the mathematics courses.
- In 1999 Blum was appointed Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
- On 16 May 2005 President George W Bush announced that Blum was one of the recipients of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.
- Blum's leadership has also been instrumental in transforming the culture of computing at Carnegie Mellon to embrace diversity as critical for the field and future of our nation and by creating a model mentorship organization, Women@SCS, for women students in computer science.
Born 18 December 1942, New York, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa, Women
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
