Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of four co-founders of thesocial networking site Facebook, of which he is chairman and chief executive.

Born and raised in New York state, he took up writing software programs as a hobby in middle school, beginning with BASIC, with help from his father and a tutor (who called him a "prodigy"). In high school, he excelled in classic literature.

He later enrolled in Harvard, majoring in computer science and sociology. In his sophomore year he wrote a program called Facemash as a "fun" project, letting students on the college's network vote on other students' photo attractiveness. It was shut down within days, but would become a template for his writing Facebook, a program he launched from his dormitory room. With the help of friends, he took Facebook to other campuses nationwide and soon after moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2010, the site had an estimated 500 million users worldwide. Zuckerberg has since been involved in various legal disputes initiated by others who have claimed a share of the company's profits due to their help in setting it up.

Since 2010 Zuckerberg has been named among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world by Time magazine's Person of the Year, In 2010 a fictionalized account of Zuckerberg creating Facebook while in college and its later start-up phase was made into a movie dramatization, The Social Network. 

Early life

Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in White Plains, New York. He is the son of Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Zuckerberg was raised Jewish, had his bar mitzvah when he turned 13, and has since described himself as an atheist.

At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg had excelled in the classics before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy in his junior year, where he won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and classical studies (on his college application, Zuckerberg listed as non-English languages he could read and write: French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek) and was a fencing star and captain of the fencing team. In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.