other breakthroughs, from designing artificial intelligences to fine-tuning classified military aircraft systems that depended on mathematics for their stability. When you wander into a deep part of Google’s technical database systems, you're touching his work. When you talk to your phone, the interface bubbles with some of his patents. How did Baran’s 1960s idea of a survivable, packet-based system at ARPAnet become the Internet in the 1970s and 80s? Danny was part of a cluster of dirty-fingernail engineers - along with engineers such as Vint Cerf and Jon Postel - who'd done the work to make it possible. His centrality in that project was memorialized in a famous speech he once delivered in which he described having one of the very first email addresses in history - and then whipped out a sheaf of bound pages that represented the entire Internet address list at the time. It ran about 50 pages. To the extent there were membership cards in the New Caste, Danny’s would have had a very low number. It was an easy decision for our prize committee. No Bill Gates. No Steve Jobs. So, here’s how | met Danny Hillis: I called to tell him he had won a million dollars. (I recommend this as a way to start a friendship.) Hillis had been a tinkerer since he was a child and never seemed to have lost the pleasure of a wild intermingling of joy and practice. You couldn’t tell with him where passion ended and work started. He was so technically adept that he could inject even the coldest digital projects with a bit of hot emotion, like Bernini breathing life into a block of carved marble with one, “just so” grace note of his chisel. One of Hillis’s most famous projects, for instance, was a 15-foot high tic-tac- toe playing tinkertoy robot he’d built when he was 20 years old, in his second year as an undergraduate at MIT in 1975. Made from 10,000 wooden spindles and poles, it was an early attempt of his to show how machines, even simple ones, might seduce us with both brains and looks.