Noam Chomsky has no documented IQ score, and no reliable figure circulates. He has been openly sceptical of IQ as a measure of human worth, his record is his citations, not a number.
Son of a Hebrew scholar born in the city
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928. His father, William, had fled Ukraine to avoid conscription and became a noted scholar of Hebrew grammar; his mother, Elsie, taught Hebrew too. Grammar was dinner-table conversation.
Ten-year-old writes on fall of Barcelona
His first political article, for his school newspaper in 1939, was about the spread of fascism after Barcelona fell in the Spanish Civil War. He has said his views on politics barely changed from then.
A newsstand education in New York
As a teenager he took the train to Manhattan to visit an uncle's newsstand, a gathering place for working-class Jewish radicals, and browsed the anarchist bookshops on Fourth Avenue.
Education: table of contents
A progressive school run on John Dewey's ideas, with no grades or competition. He later said he didn't know he was a good student until he left it.
A selective public school. He described it as regimented and competitive after Oak Lane, a contrast he never forgot.
Studied philosophy, logic and languages while living at home. Considered leaving before linguist Zellig Harris took him on.
Master's thesis on the morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew.
Junior Fellow, free to research without teaching. Much of his generative grammar took shape here.
Awarded for one chapter of his manuscript on transformational analysis. He joined MIT the same year and stayed more than 60 years.
Grammatical, meaningless, and yours
His 1957 example, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, showed that a sentence can be perfectly grammatical and make no sense, so grammar isn't about meaning. Tap any word to swap it for another of the same category. Then scramble the order.
Every version you make is grammatical nonsense: the structure holds no matter what the words mean.
Two bodies of work, side by side
Paper setting out what became the Chomsky hierarchy of formal grammars, still taught in computer science.
Short book that launched generative grammar and moved linguistics toward explaining the mind.
His demolition of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior helped end behaviourism's hold on psychology.
Introduced deep and surface structure, and the distinction between competence and performance.
Essay in the New York Review of Books against the Vietnam War; made him a leading voice of the anti-war left.
With Morris Halle: a generative theory of phonology.
His first political book, on academics who served US foreign policy.
Principles-and-parameters theory: a universal grammar with switches set by each language.
With Edward S. Herman: the “propaganda model” of how news media filter what the public sees.
Tried to reduce grammar to the simplest possible computational operations.
Critique of US global strategy; became a best-seller after Hugo Chávez held it up at the UN in 2006.
Sources
- Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton
- Chomsky, N. (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language 35(1)
- Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent. Pantheon
- Barsky, R. F. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. MIT Press
- What's Your IQ editorial review of circulated figures