ACM announced that Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard have received the Turing Award "for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science."
Bennett is an American physicist at IBM Research, and Brassard is a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal. The Turing Award is often called the Nobel Prize in computing.
An IBM press release highlights the work of Bennett and includes a short video about the work that led to the award.
Quantum information science studies how strange quantum effects can serve as tools for handling data. In 1984, Bennett and Brassard created the first working method for quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography allows two people to share a secret key for encrypting messages with security based directly on physics laws. Unlike regular public-key cryptography, which depends on hard math problems that quantum computers might break, their method uses a basic quantum rule: measuring or copying quantum information disturbs it and leaves clear signs of spying. This gives perfect security without trusting computation difficulty, a major advance over older methods where perfect secrecy needed a shared key as long as the message, as shown by Claude Shannon in 1949.
Pioneering concepts that enable future quantum systems
In 1993, Bennett and Brassard helped introduce quantum teleportation, a process that sends an unknown quantum state from one place to another using quantum entanglement and normal signals. Entanglement, once seen mainly as a puzzle, became a useful tool. In 1996, they showed entanglement distillation, purifying weak links into strong ones, essential for building reliable quantum networks over long distances. These ideas support today's quantum communication tests via fiber optics and satellites, and they guide plans for a quantum internet.
Bennett joined IBM in 1973 after studies at Brandeis and Harvard, exploring links between physics and computation. Brassard earned degrees from Université de Montréal and Cornell before joining the faculty there. Their efforts bridged disciplines, influencing cryptography, algorithms, complexity theory, and more. The award highlights how their ideas, starting from theory, now drive real quantum technologies.