Happy 40th Birthday, Mr. Torvalds!

Linus Benedict Torvalds [born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland] is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator.

Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds' directory linux. [...]
About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself. Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel. [...]
Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark, and monitors use of it chiefly through the Linux Mark Institute.

Text from the Wiki entry and image fished from here.
If you're curious to know what Mr. Torvalds has to share with the world these days, this is his blog.