The A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computer science, has gone to quantum physics for the first time. IBM's Charles Bennett and the University of Montreal's Gilles Brassard will share the award “for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.”
Bennett and Brassard pioneered the field of quantum information theory and quantum cryptography in the early 1980s. They were inspired by the ideas of Stephen Wiesner, a graduate student in the Columbia physics department in the 1960s. Wiesner devised the idea of unclonable quantum money, which laid the foundations for Bennett and Brassard's famous quantum key distribution protocol.
The Turing Award and Wiesner's contributions to the field are covered in depth in a new Quanta Magazine article.
