Canadian computer scientist Gilles Brassard co-recipient of A.M. 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 (Mandatory Credit)

A Canadian computer scientist is one of this year’s recipients of a prestigious award nicknamed the Nobel Prize of computing.

Université de Montréal professor Gilles Brassard has won the A.M. Turing Prize with IBM Research scientist Charles H. Bennett.

The men nabbed the award because they created impenetrable encryption technology in the mid-1980s that laid the foundations for modern quantum science and secure communication.

The award named after a British mathematician and Second World War codebreaker has been given out every year since 1966 by the New York-based Association for Computing Machinery.

It is meant to honour scientists and engineers responsible for groundbreaking technology and comes with a US$1 million prize from Google.

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

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 18, 2026.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press