Philosophy
Noam Chomsky
Linguist and political thinker, founder of generative grammar
Born 1928
Photo: Augusto Starita / Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación · CC BY-SA 2.0
«Language is a process of free creation.»
Noam Chomsky argued that the ability to learn language is built into the human mind, an idea that reshaped linguistics, psychology and computer science. He is separately one of the best-known critics of American foreign policy.
Key achievements
- Founded generative grammar with Syntactic Structures, 1957
- One of the most cited scholars in the humanities
Universities
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Took his bachelor's, master's and 1955 doctorate in linguistics at Penn under Zellig Harris.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Taught linguistics at MIT from 1955 for more than fifty years.
Facts
- His sentence colourless green ideas sleep furiously was invented to show that a sentence can be grammatical and meaningless at once.
- The Chomsky hierarchy of formal grammars is taught in computer science courses as the basis of how programming languages are parsed.
- He is among the most cited living authors across all academic fields.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.