Noam Chomsky

Timeline

1. 1928–1955

   Penn, Harvard and a PhD

   Born in Philadelphia in 1928, he enters the University of Pennsylvania at 16 in 1945, where Zellig Harris introduces him to theoretical linguistics. He earns an MA from Penn in 1951, develops transformational grammar as a member of Harvard's Society of Fellows from 1951 to 1955, and receives his Penn PhD in linguistics for it in 1955.

2. 1955–1976

   Professor at MIT

   Roman Jakobson secures him an assistant professor post at MIT in 1955, where he spends half his time on a mechanical translation project. With Morris Halle he founds MIT's graduate program in linguistics; he becomes a full professor in 1961 and, from 1963 to 1965, consults on a military-sponsored project to teach computers to understand natural English commands. MIT names him Institute Professor in 1976.

3. 1956–1965

   Three models and Syntactic Structures

   His 1956 paper "Three models for the description of language," published in IRE Transactions on Information Theory, first sets out the general idea of a hierarchy of grammars, now called the Chomsky hierarchy, and proves crucial to the theory of formal languages in computer science. Mouton publishes Syntactic Structures in February 1957, and Donald Knuth reads the book in 1961 and is influenced by it. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax appears in 1965.

4. 1972–1988

   National Academy and Kyoto Prize

   He becomes a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1972. In 1988, he receives the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences for his generative grammar theory, which becomes a basis for automata and mathematical linguistic theories in information science and computer science.

5. 1999–2002

   Franklin Medal and emeritus status

   The Franklin Institute awards him the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for his contributions to linguistics and their effects on computer science. He retires from MIT in 2002 and continues to conduct research and seminars on campus as an emeritus.

6. 2011

   Brains, Minds and Machines symposium

   At the Brains, Minds and Machines symposium during MIT's 150th anniversary celebrations in 2011, he derides machine-learning researchers who use purely statistical methods to mimic behavior and make no attempt to understand its meaning. His remarks answer a question from Steven Pinker about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods.

7. March 2023

   The False Promise of ChatGPT

   With linguist Ian Roberts and AI researcher Jeffrey Watumull, he publishes "The False Promise of ChatGPT" in The New York Times in March 2023, arguing that programs like ChatGPT cannot replicate human thinking and reasoning because they cannot explain the rules of English syntax. In an April 2023 interview with Monthly Review Online, he says he has seen nothing from large language models that poses even a remote challenge to his work.

8. As of October 2026

   Institute Professor emeritus at MIT

   The University of Arizona hires him in August 2017 as a laureate professor in its Department of Linguistics and as Agnese Nelms Haury Chair. After a stroke in June 2023, he moves to Brazil full-time and stops speaking in public; he is still convalescing there as of November 2025. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics emeritus at MIT and a laureate professor at Arizona, currently on leave.