From Good Will Hunting:
SEAN: Hey, Gerry. In the 1960’s there was a young man graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was assistant professor, showed amazing potential, then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.
LAMBEAU: Yeah, so who was he?
SEAN: Ted Kaczynski.
LAMBEAU: Never heard of him.
SEAN: Hey, Timmy!
TIMMY: Yo!
SEAN: Who’s Ted Kaczynski?
TIMMY: Unabomber.

Ted Kacyznski spent his career as a Mathematician composing brilliant mathematical formulas of such esoteric abstraction and high specialized nature that the number of people on Earth who could understand and appreciate them number in the tow digits. The formulas, naturally, serve no practical purpose.

Imagine, though, that something he did becomes the basis of a as-of-now completely unimaginable technology. A technology that shifts paradigms of human experience around and reshapes the landscape of how we perceive our existance. (In the process, of course, humans serve this technology in equal measure to how the technology serves humans.)

Kacyznski’s current status as extreme Luddite, mad-man, hermit terrorist, et al would then fall by the wayside, and his name would become synonymous with this Paradigm-Shifting technology. (The nature of his writings, personal and political gripes relegated to mere curiosity, a footnote in the history of this Grand Technological Breakthrough.)

That would ironic.

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