After World War II, he urged the Allies to set up a world government to control the atom bomb. He was offered the presidency of the new state of Israel in 1952 but turned it down. "Politics is for the moment," he once wrote, "while...an equation is for eternity." The equations of general relativity are his best epitaph and memorial. They should last as long as the universe.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological — technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

Professor Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, occupies the Cambridge mathematics chair once held by Isaac Newton

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Feb. 18, 1929	July 1, 1946	Feb. 19, 1979
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