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Noam Chomsky Birth
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7th 1928 to parents William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Later in 1933, his parents had another child named David Eli Chomsky. Both of his parents were prominent Hebrew Scholars during the Great Depression. -
University of Pennsylvania
In 1945, Chomsky attended the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, linguistics, and mathematics. One of his philosophy teachers was Nelson Goodman, a fellow philosopher who later presented at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. -
Carol Schatz
In 1949, Noam Chomsky married his childhood friend Carol Schatz. Carol was also a linguist who specialized in working with children and developing language. They had three children together during their 49 years of marriage: Aviva, Harry, and Diane. Carol Chomsky tragically died at the age of 78 from cancer. -
Doctorate and MIT
During 1955, Chomsky graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate degree in Linguistics. His Master's thesis was titled "The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew."
Later that same year, Noam Chomsky was asked to teach in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT). He taught there until 2005 when he retired. -
Syntactic Structures.
Chomksy writes and publishes one of his first works, "Syntactic Structures". In this writing. he elaborates on theories from his teacher Zellig Harris on his model of transformational generative grammar. -
Protesting Vietnam War
During the Vietnam war, CHomsky vocalized his distrust in the governments role and actions in the Vietnam war. He used his high status from being a professor at MIT to be able to get his voice and opinions heard. -
Current life of Noam Chomsky
To this day, Noam Chomksy is still alive and still a respected linguist and philosopher. He continues to write articles and books on philosophy and language. He also remains active in politics and attends schools for lectures. Since starting his career, he has received multiple awards including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, and Sydney Peace Prize.