Gilles Brassard is considered the founding father of quantum information science in Canada and one of its earliest pioneers in the world. Working with physicist Charles Bennett (IBM Research), he created a protocol that laid the foundations for quantum cryptography, which is the key to unconditionally secure communications. In 1992, he developed the theoretical protocol for quantum teleportation, in collaboration with Bennett and four other colleagues including Claude Crépeau, now at McGill University. In 1998, this theory was verified experimentally by another team of researchers, a feat that was selected by the journal Science as one of the 10 Breakthroughs of the year. In 2018, those two discoveries earned him and Charles Bennett the Wolf Prize in Physics, often considered a forerunner to the Nobel Prize. He was the first Canadian to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics.
Brassard’s work is foundational in quantum information science, an emerging field with the potential to create computers immeasurably more powerful than conventional computers by exploiting sometimes-counter-intuitive manifestations of quantum theory.
Gilles Brassard is a Montreal native who has been passionate about mathematics since he was a child. He enrolled at the Université de Montréal at age 13 to earn a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in computer science. In 1979, he completed a Ph.D. in cryptography at Cornell University and became an assistant professor at the Université de Montréal the same year. He held the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information Science for 21 years from 2001 until 2021. He founded and is now the scientific director of INTRIQ, the Transdisciplinary Institute for Quantum Information.
