Mr. Gilles Brassard
Fellow
Current Employer
Université de Montréal
Election Year
1996
Academy
Académie des sciences
Discipline
Mathematics and Computer Sciences
Department
Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Gilles Brassard is a world authority in cryptology and quantum information theory. He worked on 'zero-knowledge' protocols, which allow to prove knowledge of a secret without having to disclose anything about it. He pioneered the field of 'quantum cryptography', which takes advantage of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to bring a radically new dimension to the ancient problem of secure communication. He invented 'quantum teleportation', which "Discover" featured among the top world science stories of 1993: this allows the transmission of an unknown and unmeasurable quantum state. He championed 'quantum computing', which harnesses quantum mechanics to the cause of computational speed.