Academia

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Hugh Everett (who proposed the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics), and a host of others who could collectively staff a top-tier physics department.

But he has been a tremendously successful advisor,” says Michael Sipser, a theoretical computer scientist at MIT who was advised by Blum, referring to the “extraordinary number of PhD students” who have worked with him and then gone on to make an impact in the field.

A few months ago, as I was reading about some of the most significant yet counterintuitive ideas in modern theoretical computer science, I realized that the vast majority of the researchers responsible for that work had been advised by Blum.

Offering full autonomy and boundless encouragement sounded wonderful in theory, but I was mystified as to how it worked in practice—how did students receive the occasional course correction or hyper-specific advice that is often essential in academic pursuits?

While it’s easy to pay lip service to the principle of “treating a student as a colleague,” Ryan Williams, a professor of computer science at MIT who studied with Blum, told me that working together made him really feel like one.

What this means, in concrete terms, is that Blum imparted to his students a sense of pedagogical responsibility: he was really expecting to learn from them at every weekly meeting, which in turn meant they had to understand their ideas to the bone.

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