Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate. Noam Chomsky was a brilliant child. Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928. He was raised with a younger brother, David, and although his own family was middle-class, he witnessed injustices all around him.


Just as World War II was coming to a close, Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He found little use for his classes until he met Zellig S. Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistics (breaking language down into distinct parts or levels) Harris was moved by Chomsky’s great potential and did much to advance the young man’s undergraduate studies, with Chomsky receiving his B.A. and M.A in nontraditional modes of study.


In 1949, Chomsky married Carol Schatz. The relationship lasted for 59 years, until she died from cancer in 2008. They had three children together and Schatz worked as an educational specialist in the field of language acquisition in children. Chomsky continued at the University of Pennsylvania and executed some of his research and writing at Harvard University. His dissertation eventually explored several linguistic ideas he would soon lay out in one of his best-known books on linguistics,Syntactic Structures (1957).


The professorial staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invited him to join their ranks in 1955. He has now worked in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT for over half a century. For his academic pursuits, he has received a multitude of honorary degrees from universities as far flung as the University of Calcutta to the University of Chicago.


In 1967, The New York Review of Books published his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." Weaving between the world of academia and popular culture, Chomsky has gained a reputation for both his linguistic discoveries and his radical ideas, some of which have been seen as controversial and highly open to debate.


As a professor, he introduced transformation grammar to the field. One of his most famous contributions to linguistics is what his contemporaries have called the Chomsky Hierarchy, a division of grammar into groups, moving up or down in their expressive abilities. These ideas have had huge ramifications for modern psychology, both raising and answering questions about human nature and how we process information.
Some of Chomsky's published books are Aspects of the Theory of Syntax(1969), The Chomsky Reader (1987), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) and The Essential Chomsky (2008).