Episode 26. Linguistics: Noam Chomsky

Nothing is more human than language, and no one has done more to advance the science of linguistics than Noam Chomsky. Noam was born in 1928, and completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania just after the Second World War. He earned his PhD in 1955, and by 1957, he was already publishing landmark works in linguistics that disrupted the field and fundamentally altered the understanding of language. His work also devastated the field of behaviorism, led by the likes of B.F. Skinner. Noam is known as the father of modern linguistics, but his influence extends well beyond the study of language to include fundamental applications in computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, and many other fields. Noam has taught at MIT since 1955, and at the University of Arizona since 2017.