Public Talk Gilles Brassard

Public Talk “No longer Cassandra?"
by Gilles Brassard, 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award
Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 7 p.m., DAI

Quantum computers promise groundbreaking advances – but they also threaten the cryptographic systems that attempt to protect our digital world. Gilles Brassard explores why today’s security infrastructure must evolve in the face of quantum computing and how quantum cryptography offers a fundamentally different approach to secure communication.

Gilles Brassard, professor at the Université de Montréal, is a pioneer of quantum information science. He co-invented quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation and received the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Charles H. Bennett.

This event is a joint initiative of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation (HLFF) and the “Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Heidelberg” (DAI). It is a satellite event alongside the 13th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). It is part of a new series of public events through which the HLFF is opening the HLF to the wider public and fostering dialogue between leading scientists and the community. At the DAI the lecture will take place as part of the Geist Heidelberg series.