Manuel Blum
Manuel Blum (PhD, MIT) is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and at UC Berkeley. Manuel has been motivated to understand the mind since he was in second grade when his teacher told his mom she should not expect him to get past high school. As an undergrad at MIT, he spent a year studying Freud and then apprenticed himself to the great anti-Freud neurophysiologist, Dr. Warren S. McCulloch, who became his intellectual mentor. When he told Warren and Walter (Pitts) that he wanted to study consciousness, he was told in no uncertain terms it was verboten. Manuel was fortunate to have Marvin Minsky as his PhD advisor. Manuel is one of the founders of complexity theory, a Turing Award winner, and has been PhD advisor to students who have chartered new directions ranging from computational learning, cryptography, zero knowledge, interactive proofs, proof checkers, and human computation. Three of his students are also Turing Award recipients.
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