Raphael Linus Levien is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript.
12 Facts About Raph Levien
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Raph Levien holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
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Raph Levien made a computer-assisted proof system similar to Metamath: Ghilbert.
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Raph Levien has written several papers documenting his research in halftoning technology, which has been implemented in the Gimp-Print free software package, as well as by several commercial implementations.
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Raph Levien created Gill, the GNOME desktop illustration application which aimed at supporting the W3C SVG standard for Vector Graphics.
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In 2009, Raph Levien completed a PhD thesis entitled 'From Spiral to Spline: Optimal Techniques in Interactive Curve Design' and published a standalone essay on the mathematical history of Elastica.
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In November 1999, Raph Levien founded Advogato, a social website for the free software community, to test his ideas of attack-resistant trust metrics and to provide a development-focused forum for the free software community that was free of the kind of commercial motivations of such sites as SourceForge.
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Raph Levien observed that Google's PageRank algorithm can be understood to be an attack-resistant trust metric rather similar to that behind Advogato.
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Raph Levien played a small part in precipitating the relaxation of the US crypto export legislation, by filing for a Commodities Jurisdiction Request for a T-shirt containing an implementation of the RSA encryption algorithm, in four lines of Perl.
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Raph Levien recognizes the paradox: On one hand, he made money from forcing everyone who used his patented ideas to give him royalties.
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Raph Levien is divorced, with two sons: Alan and Max.
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Raph Levien is a member of the Berkeley Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.