The Association for Computing Machinery named Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard as the recipients of the 2025 A.M. Turing Award on 18 March 2026, for founding quantum information science. The award carries US$1 million, with financial support from Google.
In 1984 the two introduced BB84, the first practical scheme for quantum cryptography. It lets two people agree on a secret key whose security rests on physics: quantum information cannot be copied or measured without disturbing it, so an eavesdropper always leaves traces. Unlike today's public-key encryption, which a large quantum computer could break, BB84 does not depend on any problem being hard to solve. Versions of it already run in quantum communication networks, over optical fibre and through satellites.
In 1993, with colleagues, they described quantum teleportation: sending an unknown quantum state to a distant partner using entanglement and ordinary communication. In 1996 they showed how weak entanglement can be distilled into strong entanglement, a step towards long-distance quantum networks.
Bennett, an American physicist, has worked at IBM Research since 1973, after a PhD at Harvard University. Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist, earned his PhD at Cornell University in 1979 and joined the Université de Montréal, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information Science from 2001 to 2021.
Quantum computing now has funded PhDs of its own, such as Uppsala University's PhD in scalable quantum program verification. More are on our funded positions page.
