Blum to receive Turing Award

Manuel Blum, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, will receive the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award in February.

Blum was honored "in recognition of his contributions to the foundation of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking," an ACM press release said.

Blum is the University of California at Berkeley's Arthur J. Chick Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computing Sciences, a department in which he has served since 1968. Blum was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1938 and began his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Blum is renowned for his work on computational complexity, automata theory, inductive inference, cryptography and program result-checking. During his career, Blum has received numerous awards, published 47 technical papers and advised 26 Ph.D. students.

"Manuel Blum is a profound thinker," said ACM president Stuart H. Zweben, chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at Ohio State University. "His seminal work, insights and approaches have brought about new avenues of research in the area of computational complexity and established foundations for what people can compute."

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is given annually for technical achievements in the field of computing deemed by a jury of leading professionals to be of lasting and significant importance to the computing community. It is accompanied by a prize of $25,000, contributed by AT&T.