Antonia Wilson Bluher

Born in 1962, Toni Bluher (nee Wilson) grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. She loved math from a young age, and decided to pursue it as a career as soon as she learned that careers in math existed. She received an Honors B.S. in Mathematics with Highest Distinction from Indiana University in 1983. She recalls having the experience “of observing mysterious phenomena, struggling to understand the underlying cause, and finally viewing it in just the right way so that it all looks clear and obvious. That moment, when all is explained and the mysterious pieces fit together like crystals, is like a religious experience.”

After graduating from IU, Toni completed Part III Maths at Cambridge University (1983-84) and a Ph.D. in math at Princeton University (1984-88), specializing in number theory. She met her husband Greg in graduate school and had three children, Andrew, Julia, and Sarah, from 1987-91. She held postdoctoral positions at UCLA (1988-92) on a President’s Fellowship and Stanford (1992-94) on an NSF Fellowship. In 1995, she embarked on a 28-year career in math research at the National Security Agency. Toni reached the senior rank at NSA in 2004. She served as a technical mentor to undergraduates in NSA’s Director’s Summer Program over a ten-year period, supervised six-month technical projects for dozens of junior colleagues, and engaged in outreach to schools, universities, and mathematical conferences. She published 80 internal articles, was granted eleven patents, and served as president of NSA’s oldest learned society, the Crypto-Mathematics Institute. Toni was named the 2015 NSA Researcher of the Year, was twice awarded the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award by President Obama, and was awarded the 2022 Distinguished Presidential Rank Award by President Biden for sustained extraordinary achievement in government.

Toni studied “one-way functions”, which form the mathematical basis for public key cryptography, a method that is used to encrypt digital communications and enable safe transactions on the internet. Some questions she explored relating to one-way functions are: How secure are they? What are new applications of one-way functions? How would a quantum computer affect them? She also worked on code breaking and algorithm development. Although most of her work was classified, Toni published her unclassified research in mathematical journals throughout her career. In 2018, she was invited to present a distinguished lecture series on the Mathematics of Modern Cryptography for the Women and Mathematics Program at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ. She also served on committees for the National Science Foundation and the Winston Churchill Foundation.

She is survived by her husband Greg; her children Andrew, Julia, and Sarah, and four grandchildren. Toni counseled aspiring mathematicians with words that we can all take to heart: “keep your curiosity alive, be playful in your approach [...], look for opportunities to collaborate, and keep your ears open to new problems”.

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