Pick up a favorite CD. Now drop it on the floor. Smear it with your fingerprints. Then slide it into the slot on the player-and listen as the music comes out just as crystal clear as the day you first opened the plastic case. Before moving on with the rest of your day, give a moment of thought to the man whose revolutionary ideas made this miracle possible: Claude Elwood Shannon.

Shannon, who died in February after a long illness, was one of the greatest of the giants who created the information age. John von Neumann, Alan Turing and many other visionaries gave us computers that could process information. But it was Claude Shannon who gave us the modern concept of information-an intellectual leap that earns him a place on whatever high-tech equivalent of Mount Rushmore is one day established.