2023
Gilles Brassard
Computer scientist wins the Eduard Rhein Foundation Technology Award for work in quantum information
2023
Computer scientist wins the Eduard Rhein Foundation Technology Award for work in quantum information
Université de Montréal Professor Gilles Brassard, inventor of quantum cryptography with Charles H. Bennett and one of the world’s earliest pioneers of quantum information science, has been awarded the Eduard Rhein Foundation Technology Award for outstanding achievements in research and development of information technology.
The computer scientist shares the 40,000€ Prize for 2023 with co-winner and colleague Dr. Bennett “for the conception of the first key agreement protocol whose security is derived from the validity of quantum physics.”
In 1984, Prof. Brassard and Dr. Bennett, a chemical physicist, developed the first quantum cryptography protocol – an unbreakable encryption scheme – to protect data communications.
The significance of their work became clear a decade later, when Prof. Peter Shor, a mathematician, discovered that a hypothetical quantum computer could penetrate the cryptographic systems currently used to protect internet communications.
Data communications systems didn’t collapse following Prof. Shor’s discovery, because a quantum computer has not yet been built (as far as we know). But technology has rapidly advanced, Prof. Brassard notes, and a quantum computer will eventually become a reality.
When that finally happens, quantum cryptography will be the only guaranteed way to protect online communications, including our financial information systems. Essentially, Prof. Brassard and Dr. Bennett had developed a cure before the ailment was discovered.
Today, “quantum cryptography is on the rise,” Prof. Brassard says of the current impact of the discovery.
“It’s more and more widely studied, implemented and used, even in real life now, particularly in China where a ten-thousand-kilometre quantum cryptographic highway is already in place. Nobody would have predicted this when we made the invention.”
In 1992, Prof. Brassard and Dr. Bennett, along with their collaborators (including Prof. Claude Crépeau at McGill University), invented the concept of quantum teleportation. This phenomenon, confirmed experimentally by other researchers a few years later, is at the core of the entire theory of quantum information.
Prof. Brassard was a mathematical prodigy, beginning a bachelor’s in computer science at 13. His numerous past awards include the Wolf Prize in Physics, considered second only to the Nobel Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
