I can't find any page by Colagioia about Thue, so I can't say if he was the originator of this trend, but it's a shame not to see any mention of the origin of the name Thue on the esolang page. He was quite a mathematician; he originated the systematic study of string-rewriting systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue–Morse_sequence), which is why this name is appropriate, but made lots of other contributions, too—as a number theorist, I know him from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth%27s_theorem (which Wikipedia calls Roth's theorem, but which I think most number theorists call the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem).