![\"Charles](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/d41586-026-00818-z_52186882.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Charles Bennett (left) and Gilles Brassard pose for a photograph next to a cryptography quilt. Credit: Lise Raymond<\/p>\n
Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett have been awarded the A. M. Turing Award \u201cfor their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing\u201d. The two will share the US$1-million prize, the Association for Computing Machinery in New York City announced on 18 March.<\/p>\n
The two winners have seemingly unrelated research backgrounds: Brassard is a computer scientist at the University of Montreal in Canada, and Bennett is a physicist at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights in New York.<\/p>\n
This is the first time that the Turing Award, often described as the most prestigious prize in computer science<\/a>, has recognized work related to quantum physics. Bennett and Brassard \u2014 partly through joint work \u2014 began to investigate the power of phenomena that could go beyond what\u2019s possible with non-quantum, or \u2018classical\u2019, methods of information technology as far back as the 1970s. \u201cPeople thought it was just a little crazy,\u201d says Bennett. \u201cIt didn\u2019t occur to people that quantum effects could be used to do things that couldn\u2019t be done classically.\u201d<\/p>\n Brassard says the accolade made him \u201cextremely happy\u201d. \u201cHad I been asked to choose one recognition at any point in my career, it would have been the Turing Award,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Bennett and Brassard \u201cplayed a very big part in establishing the foundations of quantum information\u201d, says Stephanie Wehner, a quantum-communications researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. \u201cQuantum information is more than a vehicle for classical information. We can do things with it that don\u2019t have a classical analogue.\u201d<\/p>\n Quantum hacking looms \u2014 but ultra-secure encryption is ready to deploy<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Bennett and Brassard\u2019s work not only initiated a whole field of technological development, but it also fed back into researchers\u2019 understanding of the Universe, says Jonathan Oppenheim, a theoretical physicist at University College London. Bennett and others have used quantum information as a tool for investigating some of the most nagging problems about black holes<\/a>, for example. \u201cThis whole revolution of quantum information theory is really bringing insights into the physical world,\u201d Oppenheim says.<\/p>\n Quantum encryption<\/p>\n The two winners\u2019 work took inspiration from the late 1960s <\/a>work of the late physicist Stephen Wiesner<\/a>. Wiesner had pioneered the idea that the quantum \u2018weirdness\u2019 of particles such as photons \u2014 which had been seen as a potential nuisance for applications \u2014 could be put to good use.<\/p>\n In 1984, Bennett and Brassard developed the first concept of a quantum encryption key1<\/a> \u2014 one that the sender of a message could share with the receiver in a stream of photons. They showed that any device trying to intercept that stream would destroy the information stored in the photons, thereby revealing that the transmission had been intercepted. Later that decade, Bennett led a team at IBM that first demonstrated technique experimentally.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/d41586-026-00818-z_27703226.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n