I worked for a while with a Turing Award winner. And indeed, he wasn't the type of person that had time to lose on a forum. He's been working a lot his whole life. But that being said, he wasn't the most interesting person in the world either. I had other colleagues who were far less accomplished professionally but with a much broader culture than him, including in computer science.
I wasn't trying to deprecate him. He was obviously super talented and it was a privilege for a nobody like me to work with someone of this caliber. But my point is that we should be careful with 'cults of personality'.
