Biography
Linus Benedict Torvalds (born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish and American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel since 1991. He also created the distributed version control system Git. Torvalds was one of the recipients of the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize "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 and the 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award. == Life and career == === Early years === Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, on 28 December 1969, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, the grandson of statistician Leo Törnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds, and the great-grandson of journalist and soldier Toivo Karanko. His parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s.
His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. He was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winning American chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, he is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts...