The Association for Computing Machinery says Université de Montréal professor Gilles Brassard and IBM researcher Charles H. Bennett are the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipients for laying the foundations of quantum information science and encryption.
ACM president Yannis Ioannidis said: “Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself.”
Université de Montréal professor Gilles Brassard said: “The Turing Award is the most important of all international awards in computer science, and is the most significant of my career to date.”
“It demonstrates the importance of fundamental research that has at its core a curiosity to understand the universe in which we live, and it will help me promote what I have been advocating for decades.”
Often billed as the “Nobel Prize of computing”, the Turing Award is named after British mathematician Alan M. Turing and comes with a $1 million prize supported by Google.
Quantum computing leans on quantum mechanics to crunch certain problems faster than traditional machines, and the security crowd keeps warning it could shred today’s encryption.
Brassard and Bennett introduced the first practical protocol for quantum cryptography in 1984, building on researcher Stephen Wiesner’s work and giving the world BB84.
BB84 set out a way for two parties to communicate securely, even if an attacker had an infinitely powerful quantum computer sat on the other end.
In the early 1990s, the pair developed the theory behind quantum teleportation, sending information across distance using quantum mechanics rather than sci-fi beams.
You can see hints of that work in Canadian quantum firms such as Vancouver’s Photonic, which recently claimed it teleported quantum information across 30 kilometres of fibre-optic wire.
Brassard, 70, started a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Université de Montréal at 13, became an assistant professor at 24 and made full professor at 33.
He has already picked up the Order of Canada, the Ordre national du Québec, the Wolf Prize in Physics and the Micius Quantum Prize, plus a share of the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Canada’s quantum scene now boasts companies including Photonic, Xanadu and Nord Quantique, all selected for the US DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative and Canada’s rival programme unveiled in December.
Earlier Canadian Turing winners include Richard Sutton last year for reinforcement learning, and Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in 2018 for deep neural networks.
Brassard [pictured] told French-language newspaper La Presse he will attend the San Francisco award ceremony in June from home, and he did not mince words about why.
“As long as the little dictator is in power, I’m not going to the US under any circumstances, not even for accepting this award. I’ll be there on Zoom, but stepping foot in a country that declared war on us is out of the question,” he said.
