If you're going for a PhD or researching some obscure, furthest reach study of some mathematical principle and you get stuck. One of the ways to move forward is to hope that Terence Tao finds your topic interesting and can give you a few minutes of his time - because he'll probably have some ideas for moving your research forward.
Conversely, there’s a running joke that you’re in big trouble if Terry Tao takes too much of an interest in your topic of study, since he will inevitably solve all but the hardest problems in the field.
You can't expect the entire Internet to always provide enough context for you personally, with your exact level of knowledge, to understand a social media post with no additional effort. How do you expect that to work at scale? Meanwhile, Google is just a tab away.
This may be hard to believe, but a lot of us here in "the HN crowd" have zero interest in celebrity and do not keep a catalog of them all in our heads. Even intellectual ones. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's also just its own interest one or may not have.
People approach things in a lot of different ways and it would be nice if we can just respect that instead of digging on each other or making unfounded assumptions.
I don't have much interest in celebrity either, but I feel that you're short-changing Terence Tao. He's not really famous due to being celebrated, but he's celebrated due to his level of skill and breadth of mathematical knowledge (sometimes known as the Mozart of Mathematics).
I think your sentiment is misplaced as I would expect HN commenters to have heard of Tao as he often features in posts about mathematics. I'm sure I recall seeing some comments from him too.
I started to agree with you, but let's keep in mind that there are new generations of tech geeks out here who are just learning about the things we live and breathe.
I am sure 100% of thornewolf and 99% of people reading the same news as you know who Terence Tao is, but extrapolating from your own perspective is treacherous.
