- published: 10 May 2013
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Aalto University (Finnish: Aalto-yliopisto, Swedish: Aalto-universitetet) is a Finnish university established on January 1, 2010, as a result of merging the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics, and the University of Art and Design Helsinki.
Aalto University aims to create a new science and arts community by bringing together three existing universities of technology, economics and art.
In 2004, a workgroup led by Anne Brunila of the Finnish Ministry of Finance concluded that Finland had too many universities and other institutes of tertiary education which should be consolidated. Following this, Yrjö Sotamaa, president of the University of Art and Design Helsinki at the time, proposed the merger of Aalto University's founding schools in his president's opening speech in 2005. Sotamaa's line of reasoning was that this move would create a unique interdisciplinary university that was needed to create new innovative thought.[citation needed]
The idea received attention within the Finnish Ministry of Education, which appointed Raimo Sailas, a leading official at the Ministry of Finance, to investigate the possibility of a merger. After Sailas' group reported that it considered the merger to be beneficial to the Finnish academic world and economy, the Finnish government decided to go on with the project on November 11, 2007.
Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] ( listen); born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish Americansoftware engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git. He was honored (shared with Dr 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".
Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".