Jill Brassard and Charles Bennett win the 2025 Turing Award for their foundational work in quantum informatics, including secure communication protocols.
The prestigious 2025 Turing Award has been awarded to Jill Brassard and Charles Bennett for their significant contributions to quantum informatics, particularly in secure communication and computational systems.
Brassard and Bennett will jointly receive a $1 million prize from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This award marks a notable return to recognizing achievements in the quantum field for the first time since 1966.
As noted in the ACM press release, "Bennett and Brassard are globally recognized founders of quantum information science—a discipline that merges physics and computer science, utilizing quantum phenomena not merely as matter characteristics but as valuable resources for information processing and transmission."
Jill Brassard is affiliated with the University of Montreal, while Charles Bennett works at IBM's research facility in New York. Their groundbreaking work began in 1984 with the introduction of the BB84 protocol, which was the first practical method for secure key distribution in quantum cryptography.
The BB84 protocol enables two parties to securely create a shared encryption key, grounded in the laws of physics, utilizing photon streams. This method is resilient to attacks, even from adversaries with limitless computational resources, as it does not rely on computational assumptions but rather on the unique properties of quantum information.
In a further advancement in 1993, they, along with other researchers, developed the concept of quantum teleportation, leveraging quantum entanglement to transfer data instantaneously between quantum systems, regardless of distance.
Bennett remarked, "People thought [quantum informatics] was a bit crazy. They never imagined that quantum effects could be used for things that are impossible to achieve with classical methods."
In April 2025, the quantum computing company Origin Quantum is set to utilize its technology in fields such as breast cancer diagnostics and drug development, underscoring the practical applications of quantum advancements.
