Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928, Philadelphia) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and political dissident widely considered one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His development of generative grammar — the theory that humans possess an innate language faculty producing an infinite variety of sentences from finite rules — transformed linguistics from a largely descriptive to a theoretical science and had profound implications for cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of mind.