Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a middle-class Jewish family.⁠[1]

He recalls that his father was a Hebrew scholar who ran the Hebrew school system in Philadelphia and that his mother was a Hebrew teacher.⁠[2]

He recalls finishing high school at 16 and entering the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry on a scholarship, later meeting the linguist Zellig Harris through shared political interests and learning the field by proofreading Harris’s Methods in Structural Linguistics.⁠[2]

He received his BA from Penn in 1949 and his MA in 1951.⁠[3]

In 1949 he married Carol Schatz, a fellow Philadelphian he had known since early childhood; after graduating from Penn the couple spent a short time on a kibbutz in Israel.⁠[4]

From 1951 to 1955 he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows; his The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and was published in 1975.⁠[5]

He arrived in Cambridge in September 1951 and met the MIT linguist Morris Halle, who became a very close friend and with whom he went on to build MIT’s modern linguistics department.⁠[6]

He received his PhD in linguistics from Penn in 1955 and the same year became an assistant professor at MIT, rising to associate professor in 1958 and professor in 1961.⁠[7]

In 1956 he published “Three models for the description of language” in IRE Transactions on Information Theory, arguing that no finite-state Markov process can serve as an English grammar and formalising phrase structure and grammatical transformations.⁠[8]

Syntactic Structures, published in 1957, was a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT undergraduates.⁠[1]

From 1958 to 1959 he was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.⁠[5]

In 1959 he reviewed B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, a piece later regarded as the definitive refutation of behaviourist accounts of language learning.⁠[1]

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, published in 1965, was a landmark work in generative grammar that introduced technical innovations still drawn upon in contemporary work; its 50th-anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.⁠[9]

He published “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” a 12,000-word essay in The New York Review of Books asking to what extent Americans bore responsibility for the war in Vietnam; George Steiner then wrote pressing him on what action should be taken, and the two exchanged letters.⁠[10]

His protests against the Vietnam War almost landed him in jail.⁠[4]

From 1966 to 1976 he held MIT’s Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics; in spring 1969 he gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford.⁠[5]

In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor at MIT.⁠[7]

In 1988 he and the Penn economist Edward S. Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.⁠[11]

The book sets out a propaganda model arguing that US news media, far from being independent watchdogs, often serve elite interests through systemic bias, with case studies ranging from the Vietnam War onward.⁠[12]

In November 1988 he received the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences from the Inamori Foundation for creating the theory of generative grammar and contributing substantially to the formation and development of cognitive science.⁠[7]

In 1995 he published The Minimalist Program, which builds on the principles-and-parameters theory and treats Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system; he later stressed that the minimalist approach is a program, not a theory.⁠[13]

He retired from MIT in 2002 but kept his office and his position as professor of linguistics emeritus, returning for occasional lectures.⁠[6]

On October 30, 2003, he became a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.⁠[3]

In September 2006 Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez held up his 2003 book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance during a UN General Assembly speech and recommended it; the book jumped into the top ten on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s website, and the publisher ordered an extra paperback printing of 25,000 copies.⁠[14]

In December 2008 his first wife, Carol Chomsky, a language-acquisition scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, died at 78; they had two daughters and a son.⁠[4]

On June 1, 2011, the Sydney Peace Foundation named him the recipient of that year’s Sydney Peace Prize, in recognition of his critical analysis of democracy and power and his challenges to secrecy, censorship and violence; he gave the prize lecture at Sydney Town Hall that November.⁠[15]

In 2016 the documentary Requiem for the American Dream, made by Peter Hutchinson, Kelly Nyks and Jared P. Scott, was released in the United States; in it he sets out ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power and their role in growing US income inequality, in material filmed over four years.⁠[16]

In August 2017 the University of Arizona announced his appointment as a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in its Program in Environment and Social Justice; he had been a regular guest speaker and teacher there over the previous five years, and visits with his wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, led to the decision.⁠[17]

He first appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast in episode 53; topics included a common language with an alien species, the structure of language and its roots in the brain, language and thought, the limits of human cognition, Neuralink, the limits of deep learning and the meaning of life.⁠[18]

He returned for episode 316 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, whose description calls him a linguist, philosopher and political activist; topics included Putin’s motivations, the war in Ukraine, propaganda, China–US relations and hope for humanity.⁠[19]

In March 2023 he, the linguistics professor Ian Roberts and the AI director Jeffrey Watumull published “The False Promise of ChatGPT” in The New York Times, arguing that such chatbots are still far from true general intelligence and embody a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.⁠[20]

In November 2025, Jeffrey Epstein documents released by the US House Oversight Committee showed that he had remained in close contact with Epstein until at least 2017, despite Epstein’s 2008 conviction, and had written an undated letter of support praising him; MIT said it had reviewed its contacts with Epstein in 2020 but did not comment on the emails.⁠[21]

In February 2026, newly released Justice Department documents showed a more extensive relationship than previously known, including a memo suggesting he had advised Epstein on rehabilitating his public image.⁠[22]

His wife, Valeria Chomsky, issued a statement on behalf of both acknowledging serious errors in judgment; she said they met Epstein in 2015 unaware of his 2008 jail term, never witnessed any inappropriate behaviour and express solidarity with the victims, and that Chomsky had in good faith believed Epstein’s claim of being unfairly persecuted.⁠[22]

Personal website: Public link: https://chomsky.info/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

University of Arizona: Official website: https://www.arizona.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]