Charles H. Bennett
Charles H. Bennett, an IBM Fellow, received the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award — computing’s highest honor — jointly with Gilles Brassard for founding the field of quantum information science.
Career
Born in 1943 in New York City to music teachers, Bennett studied biochemistry at Brandeis University while developing an interest in computing and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. He pursued graduate work at Harvard, where he began working with Stephen Wiesner and IBM Fellow Rolf Landauer, and joined IBM Research in the 1970s, where he has spent over five decades studying the physics of computation.
His 1973 paper on logical reversibility showed that computation need not be fundamentally tied to energy dissipation, establishing information as a physical concept. With Gilles Brassard, he developed the BB84 quantum cryptography protocol in 1984 and ran the first experimental demonstration of it in 1989 — enabling secure communication rooted in the laws of physics rather than computational difficulty. A 1993 paper he co-authored on quantum teleportation showed how an unknown quantum state could be transmitted using entanglement and classical communication.
Why invite
A founding figure of quantum cryptography and quantum information science whose 50-year body of work at IBM underpins today’s quantum computing industry.