Born Dec. 7, 1928
Britannica –
“[Jewish] American linguist and political activist who founded transformational–generative grammar, an original and highly influential system of linguistic analysis.
Chomsky was introduced to the study of linguistics by his father, a Hebrew scholar who worked within the framework of historical linguistics. He studied under the linguist Zellig S. Harris at the University of Pennsylvania and earned bachelor’s (1949) and master’s (1951) degrees there. The early stages of Chomsky’s theories of language appear in his University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation, “Transformational Analysis” (1955). After receiving his degree, he began teaching modern languages and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. He became a full professor there in 1961 and was appointed Ferrari P. Ward professor of foreign languages and linguistics in 1966.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/114218/Noam–Chomsky (accessed March 12, 2009)