His excellent story, "True Names" is known among those who keep up with it as one of the very earliest of the "Cyberspace" stories.
He has been exploring the limits of transformation via technology and is widely respected as having seriously postulated the idea of asymptopic change rates and their implications for humanity.
I no longer have access to the NYT website; I am tired of news that is for the most part so vapid. But if you would be kind of enough to repost the article here, I would be very grateful.
Some of his writing is fairly hard to find, and despite winning two Hugos, he is very low key. I enjoy reading anything by him or about him. I truly believe Vinge is one of the most important poorly known thinkers and writers of our time.
Ed