In the 1930s Alan Turing first described the computer — a machine that could perform logical functions based on whatever instructions were fed to it — and then proceeded to help build one in the early 1940s that cracked the German wartime codes. His concepts were refined by other computer pioneers: John von Neumann, John Atanasoff, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.

Meanwhile, another group of scientists — including Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer — was unlocking the power of the atom in a different way, one that led to the creation of a weapon that helped win the war and define the subsequent five decades of nervous peace that ensued.

In 1947 William Shockley and his team at Bell Labs invented the transistor, which had the ability to take an electric current and translate it into on-off binary data. Thus began the digital age. Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, a decade later, came up with ways to etch many transistors — eventually millions — onto tiny silicon wafers that became known as microchips.

Many people — let's not pick on Al Gore here — deserve credit for creating the Internet, which began in 1969 as a network of university computers and began to take off in 1974 when Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn published a protocol that enabled any computer on the network to transmit to any other. A companion protocol devised by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 created the World Wide Web, which simplified and popularized navigation on the Net. The idea that anyone in the world can publish information and have it instantly available to anyone else in the world created a revolution that will rank with Gutenberg's.

Together these triumphs of science and technology advanced the cause of freedom, in some ways more than any statesman or soldier did. In 1989 workers in Warsaw used faxes to spread the word of Solidarity, and schoolkids in Prague slipped into tourist hotels to watch CNN reports on the upheavals in Berlin. A decade later, dissidents in China set up e-mail chains, and Web-surfing students evaded clueless censors to break the government's monopoly on information. Just as the flow of ideas wrought by Gutenberg led to the rise of individual rights, so too did the unfetterable flow of ideas wrought by telephones, faxes, television and the Internet serve as the surest foe of totalitarianism in this century.

Fleming, Watson and Crick, the Wright Brothers, Farnsworth, Turing, Shockley, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Noyce — any of them could be, conceivably, a justifiable although somewhat narrow choice for Person of the Century. Fortunately, a narrow choice is not necessary.

Person of the Century

In a century that will be remembered foremost for its science and technology--in particular for our ability to understand and then harness the forces of the atom and the universe — one person stands out as both the greatest mind and paramount icon of our age: the kindly, absentminded professor whose wild halo of hair, piercing eyes, engaging humanity and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius: Albert Einstein.

Slow in learning to talk as a child, expelled by one headmaster and proclaimed by another unlikely to amount to anything, Einstein has become the patron saint of distracted schoolkids. But even at age five, he later recalled, he was puzzling over a toy compass and the mysteries of nature's forces.

During his spare time as a young technical officer in a Swiss patent office in 1905, he produced three papers that changed science forever. The first, for which he was later to win the Nobel Prize, described how light could behave not only like a wave but also like a stream of particles, called quanta or photons. This wave-particle duality became the foundation of what is known as quantum physics. It also provided theoretical underpinnings for such 20th century advances as television, lasers and semiconductors.

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