Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, born on 7 December 1928 in Philadelphia, is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and political activist, sometimes called the father of modern linguistics, whose formal work on grammar became a foundation of computer science. 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 under Zellig Harris, and in 1957 he emerged as a significant figure with his landmark work Syntactic Structures. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy and the minimalist program. The Chomsky hierarchy classifies formal languages and underlies the design and analysis of programming languages: Donald Knuth credited his work with helping him combine his interests in mathematics, linguistics and computer science, and John Backus used some of his concepts in developing FORTRAN. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at MIT.