alt Hacker NewsI don't want to take anything away from Bennett and Brassard, but I'd like someone to spare a word for poor Stephen Wiesner, who invented the earliest quantum information-distribution protocols as far back as the 1960s and published them before Bennett and Brassard. He also invented Oblivious Transfer (OT) which is required for multi-party computation -- although his was a quantum protocol that demonstrated some of the ideas behind QKD, not the classical protocol we call OT today [1].* Weisner was an inspiration for Bennett and Brassard, who then realized more useful systems.
While obviously this takes nothing away from BB's many later contributions (and they have extensively credited him), it's just a reminder of the randomness that goes with scientific credit. Since my PhD thesis was on OT, I like to remind people of Wiesner. He deserves a lot more credit than he gets!
* I suppose if you're a real theoretician, since OT implies MPC and MPC implies all cryptography, then perhaps Wiesner's OT implies everything that BB did subsequently. I'm not sure any of that is true (and I've since checked with an LLM and there are some no-go theorems from the 1990s that block it, so that's super interesting.)
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Don't forget about William Wootters, who also did significant work in the 1980s on quantum information. Most notably with Zurek, he proved the quantum no-cloning theorem in 1982. This result is at the same foundational level as energy conservation or constancy of light.
He was also on the Teleportation discovery in 1993.
Wiesner was quite a character but he died a few years ago, so wouldn't have been eligible for this year's award.
If you enjoy reading about undervalued scientists, check out the life of Ernst Stückelberg, who missed out on 4 to 5 Nobel prizes because he mostly published in unknown journals. https://blogg.perostborn.com/2023/03/22/hes-not-so-easily-st...
> and I've since checked with an LLM
but did you recheck it yourself, or are you trusting unreliable narrator?