alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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%...