Lenore Blum

Lenore Blum ( born December 18, 1942 in New York City ) is an American mathematical logician and computer scientist, dealing with complexity theory.

Blum went to New York City and Caracas in Venezuela to school, finished high school at the age of 16 and then studied architecture and mathematics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology ( where she worked with Alan Perlis with computer science ) and from 1961 at the Simmons College ( a college for women) in Boston, while at the same time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( which she had previously rejected several times ) graduated at Gerald E. Sacks ( Generalized algebraic theories - a model theoretic approach, 1968). As a post-doc she was at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1973 professor at Mills College ( originally a women's college in Benicia, California ), initially only for the algebra classroom. However, they soon formed a special department of mathematics and computer science, which they presided for thirteen years. In 1979 she was the first Letts Villard Professor in Mills. From the 1980s she devoted herself full-time research and was from 1988 in the theory group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI ) in Berkeley, and from 1989 Adjunct professor of computer science at Berkeley. 1996-1998 she was a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. There she is co-director of Aladdin ( Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration).

With Mike Shub and Stephen Smale they extended the classical theory of computation ( complexity theory ), which is based on modeling with Turing machines, of " discrete " situations to " continuous " as over the real numbers. With Smale she proved in the framework of this theory in 1990 that the Mandelbrot set is undecidable, which was previously provided by Roger Penrose as a problem.

She was active in the promotion of women's studies in mathematics and one of the first members of the Association for Woman in Mathematics (AWM ), whose president she was 1975 to 1978. She was co-founder of the Math / Science Network for the promotion of mathematics education for girls in schools.

1990 to 1992 she was Vice President of the American Mathematical Society, whose fellow it is, and from 1992 to 1997 Deputy Director of MSRI.

In 1990 she was invited speaker at the ICM in Kyoto ( A theory of computation and complexity over the reals ). In 2004 she received the Presidential Award for Excellency in Science. In 2002, she was Noether Lecturer ( Computing Over the Reals: Where Turing Meets Newton ). She was an honorary doctor of Mills College in 1999.

Her husband and her son Manuel Blum Avrim Blum are computer science professors at Carnegie Mellon University.

Writings

• Lectures on a theory of computation and complexity over the reals (or at arbitrary ring ), in: Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison -Wesley, 1990, pp. 1-47
• With Filipe Cucker, Mike Shub, Stephen Smale: Complexity and real computation, Springer 1997
• Computing over the reals - where Turing meets Newton, Notices of the AMS, October 2004, online here