Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] ( listen); born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish American software engineer and hacker, who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project’s coordinator. He also created the 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”.
Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5% of Finland’s population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winning American chemist,…