Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political activist. He is considered one of the founders of modern linguistics and has written over 100 books on topics including linguistics, war, politics, and media criticism. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at MIT for over 50 years. Chomsky is known for his generative grammar theory and criticism of U.S. foreign policy. He describes his political views as anarchist or libertarian socialist.

1. Noam Chomsky

2. Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/;
born December 7, 1928) is an American
linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist,
logician, historian, political critic, and
activist.
He is an Institute Professor and Professor
(Emeritus) in the Department of
Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where
he has worked for over 50 years.
In addition to his work in linguistics, he
has written on war, politics, and mass
media, and is the author of over 100
books.

3. According to the Arts and Humanities
Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was
cited as a source more often than any
other living scholar from 1980 to 1992,
and was the eighth most cited source
overall. He has been described as a
prominent cultural figure, and he was
voted the "world's top public
intellectual" in a 2005 poll.

4. Chomsky has been described as the
"father of modern linguistics“ and a
major figure of analytic philosophy. His
work has influenced fields such as
computer science, mathematics, and
psychology.
He is credited as the creator or co-
creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the
universal grammar theory, and the
Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

5. After the publication of his first books on
linguistics, Chomsky became a prominent
critic of the Vietnam War, and since then has
continued to publish books of political
criticism. He has become well known for his
critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state
capitalism and the mainstream news media.
His media criticism has included
Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-
written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis
articulating the propaganda model theory for
examining the media.

6. He describes his views as "fairly
traditional anarchist ones, with origins in
the Enlightenment and classical
liberalism", and often identifies with
anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian
socialism.

7. Biography
Noam Avram Chomsky was born in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on
December 7, 1928. He received his
early education at Oak Lane Country
Day School and Central High School,
Philadelphia. He continued his
education at the University of
Pennsylvania where he studied
linguistics, mathematics, and
philosophy.

8. In 1955, he received his Ph. D. from
the University of Pennsylvania,
however, most of the research
leading to this degree was done at
Harvard University between 1951 and
1955.
Since receiving his Ph. D., Chomsky
has taught at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, where he now holds
the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern
Language and Linguistics.

9. Noam is the son of William
Chomsky, an emigrant from Russia.
His father was a teacher of Hebrew
and published a scholarly edition of
a medieval Hebrew grammar.
Between 1940 and1945 he became
acquainted with the workings of the
socialist-anarchist New York City
Jewish intellectual community and
considered emigrating to Israel to
work for Arab-Jewish cooperation.

10. Noam married Carol Schatz on December 24,
1949 and has two children. They remained
married for 59 years until her death from
cancer in December 2008.

11. Chomsky has made his reputation in linguistics.
He learned some of the historical principles of
linguistics from his father, William, who was a
Hebrew scholar. In fact, some of his early
research, which he did for his Masters, was
on the modern spoken Hebrew language.
Among his many accomplishments, he is most
famous for his work on generative grammar,
which developed from his interest in modern
logic and mathematical foundations.
As a result, he applied it to the description of
natural languages.

12. As a student, Noam was heavily
influenced by Zellig Harris, who was
Professor of Linguistics at the University of
Pennsylvania. It was Chomsky’s sympathy
to Harris’s political views that steered him
toward work as a graduate student in
linguistics.

13. During this time, he proofread Zellig
Harris’s Methods in Structural
Linguistics and developed a sympathy for
Harris’s ideas on politics.
He was also a student of Nelson Goodman,
the radical-empiricist philosopher.
In 1951, he accepted nomination by
Goodman as a Junior Fellow to Harvard
University. In 1953, Chomsky traveled to
Europe.

14. En route, he resolved that his
attempt to formalize structural
linguistics would not work because
language was a highly abstract
generative phenomenon.
Determined that his further work
should concern models of this
phenomenon.

15. Noam has always been interested
in politics, and it is said that
politics has brought him into the
linguistics field. His political
tendencies toward socialism and
anarchism are a result of what he
calls "the radical Jewish
community in New York."

16. Since 1965 he has become one of
the leading critics of U.S. foreign
policy. He published a book of essays
called American Power and the New
Mandarins which is considered to be
one of the most substantial
arguments ever against American
involvement in Vietnam.

17. Chomsky is very respected and has been
honored numerous times in the academic
arena. He has been awarded an
Honorary Doctorate by the University of
London and the University of Chicago, as
well as having been invited to lecture all
over the world.

18. In 1967, he delivered the Beckman
Lectures at the University of
California at Berkeley. In 1969, he
presented the John Locke Lectures
at the University of Oxford abd
Sherman Memorial Lectures at the
University of London.

19. During the year of 1955, he left his
Fellowship at Harvard University and
obtained a position at MIT where he
taught for the next 19 years. He was
also married to Carol Chomsky, a
Professor at Harvard.
Noam now holds Ferrari P. Ward Chair
of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

20. Between 1965 and1973, he played a
major role in the American resistance
against the Vietnamese policy of the
United States Government, he published
views on Southeast Asia and United
States policy in magazines such as New
York Review of Books and Ramparts and
spent a week in North Vietnam just before
Cambodian invasion. Truly, Noam
Chomsky is an impressive man.