MIT’s Peter Shor Receives 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award

Insider Brief

• The IEEE Information Theory Society announced that Peter Shor is the recipient of the 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award.
• The award recognizes Shor’s consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory.
• Shor devised Shor’s algorithm, a quantum algorithm that factors integers exponentially faster than any known classical algorithm.
• Image credit: Christopher Harting, MIT News

The IEEE Information Theory Society announced that Peter Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is the recipient of the 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award. The award recognizes Shor’s consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory.

Shor will deliver the Shannon Lecture at the International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2025, to be held in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Renowned for his pioneering work in quantum computation, Shor devised Shor’s algorithm, a quantum algorithm that factors integers exponentially faster than any known classical algorithm. His contributions have significantly advanced theoretical computer science, focusing on algorithms, quantum computing, computational geometry and combinatorics.

Shor’s academic journey began with a B.A. in mathematics from Caltech in 1981. He earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1985 under the guidance of Tom Leighton. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), he joined AT&T’s research staff, where he worked from 1986 to 2003. In 2003, Shor returned to MIT as a full professor in the applied mathematics department.