Montreal computer scientist wins prestigious Turing Award

University of Montreal professor Gilles Brassard pictured in this undated photo. Gilles Brassard has won the A.M. Turing Prize with IBM research scientist Charles H. Bennett. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout - Hatim Kaghat

A Canadian computer scientist is among this year’s winners of a prestigious award often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science.”

Gilles Brassard, a professor at the University of Montreal, won the A.M. Turing Award alongside Charles H. Bennett, a physicist at IBM Research.

The two men won the prize for developing, in the mid-1980s, a protocol that enables the confidential transmission of information and laid the foundations for modern quantum science and secure communications.

This prize, named after a British mathematician and World War II code breaker, has been awarded annually since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery, based in New York.

It aims to honour scientists and engineers behind revolutionary technologies and comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.

Past Canadian winners include Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Richard Sutton.

- This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on March 18, 2026.