A Québec computer scientist has received the computing field’s highest honour for research that helped lay the groundwork for modern quantum computing.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced today that Université de Montréal professor Gilles Brassard and IBM researcher Charles H. Bennett had been named the co-recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award, for their role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and encryption.
“Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself.”
Yannis Ioannidis, ACM
“The Turing Award is the most important of all international awards in computer science, and is the most significant of my career to date,” Brassard said in a statement on Wednesday. “It demonstrates the importance of fundamental research that has at its core a curiosity to understand the universe in which we live, and it will help me promote what I have been advocating for decades.”
Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” the Turing Award is named after British mathematician Alan M. Turing. It marks the field’s highest honour and comes with a $1-million USD ($1.45-million CAD) prize, which is supported by Google.
Quantum computing harnesses the properties of quantum mechanics to perform calculations, and can outperform traditional computers at some optimization problems. As quantum computers become more powerful, experts warn they will be able to crack traditional methods of encryption, putting the world’s passwords at risk.
Brassard and Bennett introduced the first practical protocol for quantum cryptography in 1984, building upon the work of researcher Stephen Wiesner. The BB84 protocol established a secure method of communication between two parties that would be protected even from infinitely powerful quantum computers.
In the early 1990s, the pair developed the theory underlying quantum teleportation—or sending information across distances using principles of quantum mechanics. Examples of this can be seen in today’s Canadian quantum tech companies, like Vancouver’s Photonic, which recently claimed it had teleported quantum information across 30 kilometres of fibre-optic wire.
“Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself,” ACM president Yannis Ioannidis said in a statement today.
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Brassard, 70, was a child prodigy in mathematics who started a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Université de Montréal at 13, later becoming an assistant professor at 24 and a full professor at 33.
His latest honour comes atop a mountain of career accolades. He received the Order of Canada and the Ordre national du Québec, as well as the Wolf Prize in Physics and the Micius Quantum Prize. Brassard also shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (dubbed the “Oscars of Science”) with Bennett and colleagues in 2022.
Canada’s quantum industry has borne globally recognized companies, including Photonic, Xanadu, and Nord Quantique. All three were selected for the US DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, as well as Canada’s rival program, which was unveiled this past December.
Previous Canadian Turing winners include Richard Sutton, who received the award last year for his pioneering work on the foundations of reinforcement learning, key to today’s large-language models. Canadian AI leaders Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton shared the honour in 2018 for their work on deep neural networks.
Though Brassard was thrilled by the honour, the researcher told French-language newspaper La Presse that he plans to attend the San Francisco award ceremony in June from home.
“As long as the little dictator is in power, I’m not going to the US under any circumstances, not even for this [accepting the award],” Brassard said, referring to US President Donald Trump. “I’ll be there on Zoom, but stepping foot in a country that declared war on us is out of the question.”
Feature image courtesy Université de Montréal.