Linus Benedict Torvalds (/ˈliːnəs ˈtɔːrvɔːldz/ ⓘ LEE-nəs TOR-vawldz,[3] Finland Swedish: [ˈliːnʉs ˈtuːrvɑlds] ⓘ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel.

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 cartoon character", noting that this made him "half Nobel Prize–winning chemist and half blanket-carrying cartoon character".

He started programming for it in BASIC, then later by directly accessing the 6502 CPU in machine code (he did not utilize assembly language).

"Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland", he wrote his own assembler and editor "(in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries)"[11] for the QL, and a few games.

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996,[14] graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group.

In 1990, Torvalds resumed his university studies, and was exposed to Unix for the first time in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX.

[20] On 5 January 1991[21] he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC clone[22] before receiving his MINIX copy, which in turn enabled him to begin work on Linux.

His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Navy Nyland Brigade in the summer of 1989, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland.

[25] Torvalds first encountered the GNU Project in the autumn of 1991 when another Swedish-speaking computer science student, Lars Wirzenius, took him to the University of Technology to listen to free software guru Richard Stallman's speech.

[26] After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996,[27] Torvalds accepted a position at the company in California, where he worked from February 1997 to June 2003.

He then moved to the Open Source Development Labs, which has since merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation, under whose auspices he continues to work.

[29] In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.

In 2008, Torvalds stated that he used the Fedora Linux distribution because it had fairly good support for the PowerPC processor architecture, which he favored at the time.

[41] In 2012, while giving a talk at Aalto University, Torvalds said "fuck you" after critiquing the company Nvidia, which specializes in GPU technology.

"[45][46] His attitude, which he considers necessary for making his points clear, has drawn criticism from Intel programmer Sage Sharp and systemd developer Lennart Poettering, among others.

Shortly thereafter, in the release notes for Linux 4.19-rc4, Torvalds apologized for his behavior, calling his personal attacks of the past "unprofessional and uncalled for" and announced a period of "time off" to "get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately".

[62] The Linux kernel's reboot system call accepts their dates of birth (written in hexadecimal) as magic values.

"[62] Linus developed an interest in scuba diving in the early 2000s and has achieved numerous certifications, leading him to create the Subsurface project.

[86] In 2006, Business 2.0 magazine named him one of "10 people who don't matter" because the growth of Linux has shrunk Torvalds's individual impact.