Like the information in a dream: IBM’s Charles H. Bennett receives ACM Turing award
In IBMMIT’s Endicott House was recently featured in IBM Research, which highlighted how IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett’s 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award traces back in part to the ideas sparked at the 1981 Physics of Computation Conference held at MIT’s Endicott House. The article describes how Bennett and Gilles Brassard built on Richard Feynman’s suggestion that computers “ought to be quantum” to establish the foundations of quantum information science, and explains how their work on logical reversibility, quantum cryptography (BB84), quantum teleportation, and entanglement‑based protocols is now recognized as one of the pillars of the emerging quantum‑computing era. Read an excerpt of the article below:
Many trace the origins of quantum computing to a cool spring day in 1981 at MIT’s Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts. It was there that nearly 50 physicists and computer scientists gathered for the first meeting of the Physics of Computation Conference, where the renowned physicist Richard Feynman shared his radical vision for the future of computation.
“He said that computers ought to be quantum because the world is quantum,” said Charles H. Bennett, an IBM Fellow and an attendee at the now-famous gathering. That provocation would reverberate far beyond the grounds of Endicott House, and Bennett—who had already begun thinking deeply about the physics of information—would go on to play a central role in shaping the field Feynman helped inspire. Now, he and his longtime collaborator, Université de Montréal professor Gilles Brassard, have been named recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award, computing’s highest honor.
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