Bios: Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 - )

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928 to Dr. William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky. His father emigrated to the United States from Russia, and was a renowned scholar, being the author of "Hebrew, the Eternal Language (1957)", along with many other works on the history and teaching of Hebrew. Noam entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, where he met Zelig Harris, a prominent linguist and founder of the first linguistics department in the United States. In 1947, Chomsky chose to major in linguistics, and in 1949 he started his graduate studies in that field. His BA honor's thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1949)", contained several ideas that he would later elaborate on in future work on generative grammar. In 1949, he married fellow linguist Carol Schatz.

Between 1951 and 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. There he completed his PhD dissertation "Transformational Analysis (1955)". He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, and then did much of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University. In his doctoral thesis there, he began developing some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them later in his 1957 book "Syntactic Structures".

In 1955, Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and, in 1961, was appointed as a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. From 1966 to 1976, he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor when the linguistics and philosophy programs at MIT were merged and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy was created. Chomsky has been teaching at MIT since.

Chomsky became more publicly engaged in politics, and was one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War when he published his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" in 1967. He became well known for his political views by speaking on politics all over the world and writing numerous books. His criticism of US foreign policy has made him a controversial figure, and he has come under increasing criticism from both liberals and conservatives, particularly because of his response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Chomsky has been an extremely prolific writer, and you can visit his website (http://www.chomsky.info/) for a list of books and excerpts. Most people who know about Chomsky have strong views.. either love him or curse him. That alone should tell you that he is a prominent figure in his field, be it linguistics or politics.