Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics.

He is known, among other things, for his studies into universal grammar, "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" and for his theory of generative grammar, which attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences.

He is an Institute Professor, the highest title that can be awarded to a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and professor emeritus of linguistics.