Shannon Award for 2025
The IEEE Information Theory Society is pleased to announce that Peter Shor is the recipient of the 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award for consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. He will deliver his Shannon Lecture at ISIT 2025
Jul 11, 2024
Portrait of Peter Shor

The IEEE Information Theory Society is pleased to announce that Prof. Peter Shor (MIT) is the recipient of the 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award for consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. He will deliver his Shannon Lecture at ISIT 2025 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. 

(Photo credit: Christopher Harting, MIT News)

Peter Shor is the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Shor is well known for his quantum factoring and discrete-log algorithms. Following the 1994 publications of those algorithms Prof. Shor made a number of fundamental information-theoretic contributions that set firm engineering foundations for the field. To address the concern that errors and noise would be an insurmountable problem to implementation of the factoring algorithm, Shor proposed the first quantum error-correcting codes. Next, while classic error-correction presumes reliable encoding and ecoding, quantum algorithms cannot make the same assumption. Shor developed a theory of, and methods for, fault-tolerating quantum computing. Third, Shor worked with co-workers to develop a systematic theory of quantum error-correction that allowed classic code constructions to be imported into quantum ECC. Fourth, Shor contributed to a number of questions of channel capacity for quantum channels. Beyond the above Peter Shor has contributed to a wide range of other problems, say in quantum cryptography and other fields. Peter Shor also served as the first AE in “Quantum Information Theory” for the IEEE Trans. on Inf. Theory from 2000-2002.