Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky, born on December 7, 1928, is an American intellectual, philosopher, linguist, political activist and social critic, sometimes called the father of modern linguistics and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows he developed the theory of transformational grammar, for which he earned his doctorate in 1955, and in 1957 he emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his work Syntactic Structures.