Biography | Linus Torvalds — Finland's Largest Prize Was Cut in Half in This Hall

The committee that awards Finland's largest technology prize could not choose between two candidates, so for the first time in the award's history it split the prize.

On 13 June 2012, at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, President Sauli Niinistö presented the Millennium Technology Prize to two people.

Linus Torvalds took one half. Shinya Yamanaka, who had found a way to make pluripotent stem cells without using embryos, took the other.

Each received 600,000 euros out of a total of 1.2 million.

Technology Academy Finland has given the prize every two years since 2004, for innovations that improve the quality of ordinary life. Tim Berners-Lee was its first winner.

The committee's stated test is whether an innovation has already changed people's lives and whether it can keep doing so. Both candidates cleared it that year, and neither could be dropped.

Torvalds was the first Finn to receive it, twenty-one years after he started the kernel.

Yamanaka's year improved further still. Four months after this ceremony he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The citation for Torvalds credited the creation of a new open source operating system leading to the widely used Linux kernel.

There is an irony in that wording. The name being honoured is the one he did not choose, given to a directory on a server in Espoo by a volunteer administrator who disliked the name he had picked for himself.

The Opera House on the shore of Töölönlahti opened in 1993, the year before Linux 1.0.

Photo: Vacatio, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. The main entrance in March 2026.

Second image: Torvalds in Tianjin in September 2012, three months after this ceremony. Photo: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.