From: madden@mpi-sb.mpg.de (Peter Madden)
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 20:33:52 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Turing Award
Message-ID: <199510311219.NAA02181@mpii02024.ag2.mpi-sb.mpg.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Hi All,

Further to previous cypherpunk discussions on cryptography, and on program
checking/verification, the below announcement of this years Turing Award
should be of interest (apologies if this is old news).

Pete

=================================================================

Dr Peter Madden,                                Email: madden@mpi-sb.mpg.de
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik,            Phone: (49) (681) 302-5434
Im Stadtwald, W-66123 Saarbruecken, Germany.    Fax: (49) (681) 302-5401

=================================================================


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>From seidel@cs.uni-sb.de Thu Oct 26 08:57:10 1995
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 08:57:02 +0100
From: seidel@cs.uni-sb.de (Raimund Seidel)
To: profs@sol.cs.uni-sb.de
Subject: Turing Award
Content-Length: 4661

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ACM'S A.M. Turing Award, computing's highest honor, goes to
Manuel Blum of University of California, Berkeley
Date: Saturday, October 21, 1995 3:55PM
 
BW1320  OCT 20,1995      15:22  PACIFIC      18:22  EASTERN
 
 
( BW)(ACM/TURING-AWARD/BLUM) ACM'S A.M. Turing Award, computing's
highest honor, goes to Manuel Blum of University of California, Berkeley
 
    Business Editors
 
    NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 20, 1995--Considered the Nobel
Prize of Computing, the A. M. Turing Award of the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM), will be given to distinguished computer
scientist, Manuel Blum, of the University of California, Berkeley.
The award will be presented to Blum at a special awards ceremony
during the kick off of ACM's yearlong 50th anniversary celebration,
February 14-18, 1996 in Philadelphia.
    Blum was honored with the Turing Award "in recognition of his
contributions to the foundation of computational complexity theory
and its applications to cryptography and program checking."
computing devices, Blum's research has developed around a single
unifying theme: finding positive, practical consequences of living in
a world where all computational resources are bounded.  Blum shows
that secure business transactions, pseudo-random number generation,
and program checking are all possible precisely because all
computational devices are resource bounded.
    Blum is one of the founders of computational complexity theory, a
field that is central to theoretical computer science, and one which
deals with measuring the difficulty of performing computations.  His
work on machine-independent complexity yields a theory of
computational cost that is relevant also to practical problems.
Cryptographic protocols which are used in the transmission of
sensitive information are secure because they can be shown to be
information in a cryptographically encoded message without going
through an inordinately complex computation that would be
prohibitively costly and time consuming to perform.  For computer
programs it is very difficult to develop perfectly error-free
programs.  In this area Blum has shown how his techniques can be
applied to make programs more reliable, and to check their results.
Since this work is very fundamental one can expect that it will find
application to many other practical problems, as well.
    "Manuel Blum is a profound thinker,"  said ACM President Stuart
H. Zweben, chairman 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.  Furthermore, his work has influenced other Turing Award
winners to a significant degree."
    The ACM A. M. Turing Award is given annually for technical
achievements in the field of computing which are 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.
    Dr. Blum is 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.  Dr.  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.,
Warren S. McCulloch, Hartley Rogers Jr. and Marvin Minsky.  Dr.
Blum is renowned for his work on computational complexity, automata
theory, inductive inference, cryptography and program
result-checking.  During his career, Dr.  Blum has received numerous
awards, published 47 technical papers and advised 26 Ph.D.  students.
    ACM, founded in 1947, is an 85,000 member international
scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the
art, science, engineering and application of information technology.
ACM serves both professional and public interests by fostering the
open interchange of information and by promoting the highest
professional and ethical standards.  This is accomplished through its
many publications, conferences, special interest groups, chapters and
network communications.
 
    --30---rg/ny*
 
    CONTACT: Terrie Phoenix
             (212) 626-0531
             phoenix@acm.org
    KEYWORD: NEW YORK
    INDUSTRY KEYWORD: COMPUTERS/ELECTRONICS COMED
 
 
REPEATS: New York 212-575-8822 or 800-221-2462; Boston 617-236-4266 or
         800-225-2030; SF 415-986-4422 or 800-227-0845; LA 310-820-9473
     BW URL: http://www.hnt.com/bizwire
 
 
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