Comment by apelapan

The comparison to Trump seems very unfair. I'm not in the academy and didn't know the current standing of his work, but he was certainly a big name that popped up everywhere (as a theorists in the field, not as a general celebrity) when I took an introduction to linguistics 20+ years ago.

As this is Hacker News, it is worth mentioning that he developed the concept of context-free grammars. That is something many of us encounter on a regular basis.

No matter what personality flaws he might have and how misguided some of his political ideas might be, he is one of the big thinkers of the 20th century. Very much unlike Trump.