You underestimate academia. Any academic that reads these two sentences only focuses on the first one: He has a named chair at Courant. In Germany, being a a Prof is added to your ID card/passport and becomes part of your official name, like knighthood in other countries.
replyNo true regarding the IDs, only PhD titles can be added. Not job descriptions. Source: academia person in Germany.
replyIt seems Germans add their PhD titles even to their nicknames. :)
replyIt's not comparing him to anyone. He has an endowed professorship. This is standard in academia, and you give the name because a) it's prestigious for the recipient and b) it strokes the ego of the donor.
replyRight: no-one cares about the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemat... because of Henry Lucas, it's the other way around.
replyhttps://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1441/
replyThis is just the official name of a chair at NYU. I'm not even sure Jacob T. Schwartz is more well known than Yann LeCun
Yann is definitely more well-known outside of academia. Inside academia, it's going to depend a lot on your specific background and how old you are.
replyThat’s not a comparison to another person. That’s his job title. It is not uncommon for universities to have distinguished chairs within departments named after a notable person—in this case, the founder of NYU’s Department of Computer Science.
replyEh, that paragraph reads perfectly normal to me.
replyEither you have not read enough Wikipedia pages, or you have too much to complain about. (Or both.)