Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures argued that a language's grammar can be described as a finite system of formal rules capable of generating its infinite set of grammatical sentences, introducing transformational generative grammar. Chomsky went on to propose that this rule generating capacity is an innate, biologically based feature of the human mind, a position known as universal grammar, and his work is widely credited with helping to trigger what came to be called the cognitive revolution across linguistics and psychology.