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> Now, Tao is a sort of a celebrity of the quarter on HN, but I promise you that outside this forum, almost no one has ever heard of him.

This is an absurd thing to say. Hacker news is not the only place that knows about the most famous mathematician in the world. Glancing at Google Trends he seems to be roughly as famous as Linus Torvalds. Not exactly a household name but by no means obscure.

by TrackerFF1 hours ago|

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Go to a busy main street.

Ask 1000 different individuals if Terrence Tao rings a bell. If 5% or less can answer you who Tao is, it is safe to say that Tao is obscure.

I'd be very surprised if you can find over 50 individuals, out of the 1000, who can tell you who Terrence Tao is. Even big names like Euler or Gauss would surprise me.

by matherial8 hours ago|

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I'm going to charitably assume that you forgot to include quotes around the names in your query, because that's absolutely not what Google Trends shows.

Stop 100 people on the street in NYC or Berlin or Tokyo and I bet none of them will be able to name any living mathematician. A few of them might know Linus, though.

by traes7 hours ago|

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Yes, it absolutely is what it shows[0]. I have no idea what data you're looking at that suggests otherwise. Worldwide or in the US, as public individuals or as search terms with quotes or without quotes, over any reasonable timespan, they get roughly the same amount of searches.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F047mjr%2C%...

by 7 hours ago|

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