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 (Now sold to Microsoft) and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface.

He was honoured, 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 and the 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award.