Cette conférence, présentée à l’occasion du 50^e anniversaire du Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle de l'Université de Montréal, sera prononcée en anglais par Charles H. Bennett, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Résumé 

Physicists, mathematicians and engineers, guided by what has worked well in their respective disciplines, acquire different scientific tastes, different notions of what constitutes an interesting, well-posed problem or an adequate solution. While this has led to some frustrating misunderstandings, it has invigorated the theory of communication and computation, enabling it to outgrow its brash beginnings with Turing, Shannon and von Neumann, and develop its own mature scientific taste, adopting and domesticating ideas from thermodynamics and quantum mechanics that physicists had mistakenly thought belonged solely to their field.

Programme complet