Charles Bennett (l) and Gilles Brassard (r) at the 2024 Mathemalchemy in Montreal. Dr. Bennett and Dr. Brassard are best known for laying the foundations of quantum information science.Lise Raymond/Supplied
As this week’s best picture winner, One Battle After Another reminded moviegoers, the revolution will not be televised.
But now a different award has become the latest sign that the revolution may be quantized, which is to say its information will be protected using quantum technology.
On Wednesday, a Canadian and U.S. researcher who together established the principles of quantum communication and encryption, were named this year’s recipients of the prestigious Turing Award in computer science.
Gilles Brassard, 70, a professor at the University of Montreal, and Charles Bennett, 82, of IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., will share the award, bestowed annually by the New York City-based Association for Computing Machinery.
The award comes with a US$1-million purse, courtesy of its sponsor, Google, Inc.
Dr. Bennett and Dr. Brassard are best known for laying the foundations of quantum information science, a field that is projected to become essential once quantum computers reach sufficient scale to break standard methods for encrypting sensitive data, including financial transactions.
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As described in the association’s announcement, the pair’s seminal research paper on the subject, originally published in 1984, showed how two parties could employ quantum physics to establish secure communications “even against adversaries with unlimited computational power and technological sophistication such as a quantum computer.”
The award further recognizes Dr. Bennett and Dr. Brassard for their work, together with other collaborators, on the phenomenon of quantum teleportation, in which the quantum information that precisely describes the state of a particle can be transferred and recreated elsewhere without the need to physically send the particle.
Both researchers have previously won recognition for their discoveries. They jointly picked up the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2018 and along with the U.K.’s David Deutsch and the U.S.’ Peter Shor scored the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2023.
Dr. Brassard said receiving the Turing Award was especially meaningful in one sense because it is considered the highest accolade in computer science, “and I am a computer scientist" rather than a physicist.
He added that the prize was more than a personal honour.
“It means that the field of research that I initiated decades ago with Charles Bennett has finally received its most important international recognition.”
Dr. Brassard was born in Montreal and earned his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in computer science at the University of Montreal, before going to Cornell University for his PhD.
As he told The Globe and Mail when he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize, he met Dr. Bennett, his future collaborator, in 1979 while swimming during a break at a conference in Puerto Rico.
Dr. Bennett, a native New Yorker with a PhD from Harvard University, had joined IBM in 1972 where he was exploring how the laws of physics underpin the workings of computers and information.
Dr. Brassard said that Dr. Bennett swam up to him in Puerto Rico without introduction and launched into a conversation about how he knew a way to make a bank note that no one could counterfeit.
Before long, the two were collaborating on the idea of quantum encryption and created a protocol, dubbed BB84, describing how it could be accomplished.
Today the work is widely acknowledged to have launched an entire field.
While grounded in the principles that reach back a century, the discoveries made by Dr. Brassard and Dr. Bennett were hypothetical at first because the kinds of machines that can create and manipulate information using quantum physics didn’t exist.
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This has changed rather dramatically as experimental physicists and private companies alike work to develop hardware for a quantum-empowered world.
A key feature of that world is likely to be quantum encryption, as envisioned by Dr. Bennett and Dr. Brassard.
“They really spearheaded this whole community,” said Thomas Jennewein, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., who holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in global quantum internet systems.
Dr. Jennewein is leading the development of a Canadian Space Agency satellite called QEYSSat, that is designed to test quantum communication over long distances.
Originally from Germany, Dr. Jennewein said that Dr. Brassard helped to influence his decision to stay in Canada and make a career in the country, in part because Dr. Brassard was so welcome and engaged with younger colleagues in a quantum information program sponsored by the Canadian research funding organization CIFAR.
Dr. Jennewein praised the pioneering work of both Turing Award winners, and called the prize “well deserved”.
The Award is named after Alan Turing, a British mathematician and wartime codebreaker who established much of the theoretical basis for computer science.
Other recent Canadian winners of the Turing Award including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (2018) and Richard Sutton (2024). All three are known for work related to machine learning and artificial intelligence.