Congrats to Bennett and Brassard on the Turing Award!
I’m on a spring break vacation-plus-lecture-tour with Dana and the kids in Mexico City this week, and wasn’t planning to blog, but I see that I need to make an exception. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the Turing Award, for their seminal contributions to quantum computing and information including the BB84 quantum key distribution scheme. This is the first-ever Turing Award specifically for quantum stuff (though previous Turing Award winners, including Andy Yao, Leslie Valiant, and Avi Wigderson, have had quantum among their interests).
As a practical proposal, BB84 is already technologically feasible but has struggled to find an economic niche, in a world where conventional public-key encryption already solves much the same problem using only the standard Internet—and where, even after scalable quantum computers become able to break many of our current encryption schemes, post-quantum encryption (again running on the standard Internet) stands ready to replace those schemes. Nevertheless, as an idea, BB84 has already been transformative, playing a central role in the birth of quantum information science itself. Beyond BB84, Bennett and Brassard have made dozens of other major contributions to quantum information science, with a personal favorite of mine being the 1994 BBBV (Bennett Bernstein Brassard Vazirani) paper, which first established the limitations of quantum computers at solving unstructured search problems (and indeed, proved the optimality of Grover’s algorithm even before Grover’s algorithm had been discovered to exist).
While I take my kids to see Aztec artifacts, you can learn much more from Ben Brubaker’s Quanta article, to which I contributed without even knowing that it would be about Bennett and Brassard winning the Turing Award (info that was strictly embargoed before today). It’s an honor to have known Charlie and Gilles as well as I have for decades, and to have been able to celebrate one of their previous honors, the Wolf Prize, with them in Jerusalem. Huge congrats to two of the founders of our field!