Blum was born to a Jewish family in New York City, where her mother was a science teacher. They moved to Venezuela when Blum was nine. After graduating from her Venezuelan high school at age 16, she studied architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology beginning in 1959. With the assistance of Alan Perlis, she shifted fields to mathematics in 1960. She married Manuel Blum, then a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and transferred in 1961 to Simmons College, a private women's liberal arts college in Boston. Simmons did not have a strong mathematics program but she was eventually able to take Isadore Singer's mathematics classes at MIT, graduating from Simmons with a B.S. in mathematics in 1963. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. Her dissertation, Generalized Algebraic Theories: A Model Theoretic Approach, was supervised by Gerald Sacks. She had switched to being advised by Sacks after being unable to follow an earlier advisor in his move to Princeton University because, at the time, Princeton did not accept female graduate students.
Career
After completing her doctorate, Blum went to the University of California at Berkeley to work with Julia Robinson as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in mathematics. However, the department had no permanent positions for women, and after two years, her position as lecturer was not renewed. In 1971 she became one of the founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics. In 1973 she joined the faculty of Mills College, a women's college in the Oakland hills near Berkeley. In 1974 she founded the mathematics and computer science department at Mills, at that time the only computer science program at a women's college. She served as the head or co-head of the department for 13 years. From 1975 to 1978 she served as the third president of the Association for Women in Mathematics. In 1979 she was awarded an endowed professorship, the first Letts-Villard Chair at Mills. In 1983 Blum won a National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women award to work with Michael Shub for two years at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 1987 she spent a year at IBM. In 1992 Blum became the deputy director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, working there with its director William Thurston. After visiting the City University of Hong Kong in 1996–1998 to work on her book Complexity and Real Computation, she became a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. At CMU, she took the philosophy that the low numbers of women majoring in computer science were in part caused by a vicious cycle: because there were few women, the women in computer science had fewer support networks than men. And because these factors made being a computer scientist less pleasant and more difficult for the women, fewer women chose to major in computer science. Instead of the then-popular approach of changing the curriculum to be more application-centric in the hope of attracting women, she pushed to maintain a traditional computer science program but to change the culture surrounding the program to be more welcoming. In support of this goal, she founded the Women@SCS program at CMU, which provided both mentoring and outreach opportunities for women in computer science. Through this program, which came to be directed by Blum's student Carol Frieze, CMU was able to increase the proportion of women in the undergraduate computer science program to nearly 50%. Blum also founded Project Olympus at CMU, a business incubator program that led to many startups in Pittsburgh associated with CMU and its computer program. She resigned from CMU in 2018 after a change in management structure of Project Olympus led to sexist treatment of her and the exclusion of other women from project activities.
Lenore Blum is married to Manuel Blum and is the mother of Avrim Blum. All three have been MIT alumni and professors of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
