Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American<br />linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and<br />political activist. Sometimes called “the father of modern<br />linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and<br />one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint<br />appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts<br />Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University<br />of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as<br />linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with<br />anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.<br />Born to working-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in<br />Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from<br />alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University<br />of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society<br />of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational<br />grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began<br />teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in<br />linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played<br />a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959<br />Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for<br />Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal<br />grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky<br />hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal<br />role in the decline of behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the<br />work of B. F. Skinner.