Rasmus Lerdorf is considered the father of PHP, as he started developing it in 1994. PHP was originally created as a personal home page tool called PHP/FI but later became known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The current stable version of PHP is 5.4.11, released in 2013. PHP6 is still in development and will include features like improved Unicode handling. Variable names in PHP are case-sensitive and cannot start with a number. The header() function is used to send HTTP headers to clients and can be used for redirection, page refreshing, and sending email headers.