User:Linas/Biography

Aall about me, Linas Vepstas

Linas is a common given name among people of Lithuanian descent. Lithuanian children are traditionally given one pagan name and one Christian name; thus Linas is the given pagan name, in honor of Linai, the name of the flax or linseed plant, from which linen cloth is woven. Traditional Lithuanian folk clothing is made primarily of woven linen cloth. The Indo-European root lin- also appears in the words linseed oil and linoleum.

I am currently employed by Novamente as an artificial general intelligence hacker, currently focusing on linguistic interfaces. Until recently, I worked at IBM as a hacker working on the Linux kernel for PowerPC-based mainframes. The Linux on the PowerPC wiki is a good place to find out more about IBM Linux mainframes and systems. I've been active in the Linux community; my personal website at http://www.linas.org/ has a set of once-extensive but now stale Enterprise Linux pages. I was a founder of the Gnome Foundation; and I was the lead developer for GnuCash for over 7 years. I've founded three dot-com startups, with real VC money: "Teleport Travel" (later "Intransco"), "Gnumatic", and "Tristel" (later "TQI"). All of which failed to enrich me financially. I was a founding member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board; and spent 8 years learning about and designing 3D graphics hardware and software. I received a PhD in theoretical physics from SUNY at Stony Brook; the thesis topic was suggested by A. D. Jackson and Fred Goldhaber, on the bag model, which combines quark and meson models of the nucleon. I frittered away the marvelous opportunity offered by a year-long postdoc at SPhT-Saclay at CEA/CEN. Currently, I am utterly infatuated with mathematics, and have made large contributions to over 300 math articles in Wikipedia. BTW, y'all, global warming is for real. Do something about it.

This user attends or attended the University of Chicago.