Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard are the recipients of the 2025 ACM Turing Award in recognition of their role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science, thereby transforming secure communication and computing.
Established in 1966 this annual award named for Alan M. Turing, is the most prestigious of those made by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). It carries a prize of $1,000,000, with financial support from Google and is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing.
The 2025 edition of the award goes to Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard, whose collaboration over four decades has bridged two previously distinct disciplines: physics and computer science.
According to the ACM announcement:
Their work has influenced cryptography, algorithm design, computational complexity, learning theory, interactive proofs, and mathematical physics, while their research helped catalyze a generation of physicists and computer scientists to work across disciplinary boundaries.
Charles H. Bennett is an American physicist whose research has shaped the foundations of quantum information science, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation, and who has played a central role in establishing quantum information science as a rigorous scientific discipline. Having earned his Bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and his PhD from Harvard University, he joined IBM Research in 1973 and has spent his career there exploring connections between physics (especially thermodynamics and quantum mechanics) and computer science (cryptography, computability, computational complexity, and information theory), to advance the theoretical and practical understanding of computation and quantum mechanics.
Gilles Brassard is a Canadian computer scientist widely recognized as the first in the world to have delved into the uncharted territory of quantum information science. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Université de Montréal, and his PhD in theoretical computer science from Cornell University in 1979 under the direction of 1986 Turing Award laureate John E. Hopcroft. He then joined the faculty of the Université de Montréal and was Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information Science from 2001 to 2021.
It was in 1984 that Bennett and Brassard introduced the first practical protocol for quantum cryptography, now known as BB84. Their paper, “Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing,” demonstrated that two parties could establish a secret encryption key with security guaranteed by the laws of physics, even against adversaries with unlimited computational power and technological sophistication such as a quantum computer. BB84 achieves information-theoretic security without computational assumptions, instead relying on a fundamental property of quantum information: it cannot be copied or measured without disturbance. Any attempt at eavesdropping leaves detectable traces before any information can be compromised. Variants of BB84 have already been implemented in operational quantum communication networks around the world, using both landlines via fiber and free space communication through satellites.
Yannis Ioannidis, President of ACM states:
“Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself, Their insights expanded the boundaries of computing and set in motion decades of discovery across disciplines. The global momentum behind quantum technologies today underscores the enduring importance of their contributions.”
Bennett and Brassard will formally receive the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award at the ACM’s annual awards banquet on Saturday, June 13, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
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