Linus Torvalds

Linus Benedict Torvalds born December 28, 1969 is a Finnish software engineer, American naturalized, who is the creator and, for a long time, principal developer, of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systems such as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel. He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of statistician Leo Trnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedishspeaking minority. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prizewinning American chemist, although in the book Rebel Code Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character, noting that this makes him half Nobel Prizewinning chemist and half blanketcarrying cartoon character.

Source: Wikipedia