Department of Mathematics

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Dr. Antonia Bluher, who received her honors bachelor of science degree in mathematics from Indiana University in 1983, will receive a 2023 IU Distinguished Alumni Service Award during celebrations over Homecoming weekend this coming October.

Each year, Indiana University recognizes outstanding alumni with the Distinguished Alumni Service Award, the highest accolade reserved solely for alumni. The awardees are leaders in their chosen fields who make significant contributions benefiting their community, state, nation, or university.

After graduating from IU, Bluher completed Part III of the mathematical tripos at Cambridge University on a Winston Churchill Scholarship. She earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1988, writing a thesis on the topic of automorphic forms, which are central to her field of specialization, number theory. During graduate school, she married fellow graduate student, Greg Bluher, and they had three children. During her time at Princeton, she was a classmate of IU mathematics faculty member Distinguished Professor Michael Larsen. Afterwards, she held postdoctoral positions at UCLA (1998-1992) and Stanford (1992-1994). In 1995 she joined the National Security Agency (NSA) in Maryland, where she has been for the last 27 years. The NSA is the world’s largest employer of mathematicians.

After graduating from the Crypto-Mathematics Program (CMP) in 1998, she joined NSA’s Math Research Group, where she has worked her entire career. Her areas of expertise are in public key cryptography, novel usage of one-way functions, private information retrieval, lattices, finite fields, and quantum computation. She served as Technical Director of the Director’s Summer Program (DSP) in 1999 and 2000, and served twelve times as a problem supporter for the DSP. She is also a past president of NSA’s oldest learned society, the Crypto-Mathematics Institute.

Bluher has maintained interest in academic mathematics, publishing regularly in academic journals. In 2018, she presented (jointly with Dr. Kristin Lauter) the Uhlenbeck Distinguished Lecture series on the Mathematics of Modern Cryptography in the Women in Mathematics Program at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. In 2019, she was a plenary speaker at the Fq14 conference on finite fields in Montreal, Canada. Bluher was twice awarded the Presidential Meritorious Rank Award by President Obama (in 2009 and 2015), and she was named the 2015 NSA Researcher of the Year by NSA’s Chief of Research. She and Greg live in Ellicott City, Maryland, and they have four grandchildren. In addition to time with her family, she enjoys hiking, tennis, and foreign languages.

There is more about Dr. Bluher’s connections to IU, and her attraction to mathematics, available at https://honorsandawards.iu.edu/awards/honoree/2574.html .