1 Answer

Avram Noam Chomsky ( /?no?m ?t??mski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, computer scientist, philosopher,^[2][3]cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) of in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT.^[4] Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics"^[5][6][7] and a major figure of analytic philosophy.^[2] His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.^[8][9]

Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy theorem, the Universal grammer theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. Describing Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, Stanford University computer scientist and Professor EmeritusDonald Knuth wrote: "Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!"^[10]

Chomsky has been active in left-wing politics and he opposed the Vietnam War.^[11] His social criticism has also 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.

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. He is also the eighth most cited source of all time, and is considered the "most cited living author".^{[12][13][14][15]}He has been described as a prominent cultural figure,^[16] while his critiques of U.S. foreign policy have raised controversy.^[17] Chomsky is the author of over 150 books.^[18]