Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds -(born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator, and for a long time, principal developer of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systems such as the Linux operating systems, Android, and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system Git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. 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 Awardand the 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award.
Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni)—a six-time Finnish national karate champion—whom he first met in the autumn of 1993. Linus was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date. Tove and Linus were later married and have three daughters, Patricia Miranda (born 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born 1998), and Celeste Amanda (born 2000), two of whom were born in the United States.The Linux kernel's reboot system call accepts their dates of birth (written in hexadecimal) as magic values.