“Nobel Prize in Computing” goes to Brandeis alum Charles H. Bennett
Photo Credit: IBM
March 24, 2026
Physicist Charles H. Bennett ‘64 has been awarded the A.M. Turing Award, considered computing’s highest prize. He was a co-recipient of the award with his longtime collaborator, Canadian computer scientist Gilles Brassard.
According to the Association for Computing Machinery, the organization that gives out the annual award and the $1 million prize that accompanies it, the pair are widely recognized as founders of quantum information science, “a field at the intersection of physics and computer science that treats quantum mechanical phenomena not merely as properties of matter, but as resources for processing and transmitting information.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis in 1964 and his doctorate from Harvard University, he joined IBM Research in 1973, and still works there today. He has received several prominent awards, including the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Micius Quantum Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He is also a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
Bennett is not the first member of the Brandeis community to receive a Turing Award. In 2013, Computer scientist Leslie Lamport, GSAS MA’63, PhD’72, H’17, received the award for his work with distributed systems.