Noam Chomsky
In academia

McGilvray observes that Chomsky inaugurated the " cognitive revolution " in linguistics, and that he is largely responsible for establishing the field as a formal, natural science, moving it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics dominant during the mid-20th century. As such, some have called Chomsky "the father of modern linguistics". Linguist John Lyons further remarked that within a few decades of publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become "the most dynamic and influential" school of thought in the field. By the 1970s his work had also come to exert a considerable influence on philosophy, and a Minnesota State University Moorhead poll ranked Syntactic Structures as the single most important work in cognitive science. In addition, his work in automata theory and the Chomsky hierarchy have become well known in computer science, and he is much cited in computational linguistics.

Chomsky's criticisms of behaviorism contributed substantially to the decline of behaviorist psychology; in addition, he is generally regarded as one of the primary founders of the field of cognitive science. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results; Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

ACM Turing Award winner Donald Knuth credited Chomsky's work with helping him combine his interests in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science. IBM computer scientist John Backus, another Turing Award winner, used some of Chomsky's concepts to help him develop FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level computer programming language. Chomsky's theory of generative grammar has also influenced work in music theory and analysis, such as Fred Lerdahl 's and Ray Jackendoff 's generative theory of tonal music.

Chomsky is among the most cited authors living or dead. He was cited within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. Chomsky was also extensively cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index during the same period. The librarian who conducted the research said that the statistics show that "he is very widely read across disciplines and that his work is used by researchers across disciplines... it seems that you can't write a paper without citing Noam Chomsky." As a result of his influence, there are dueling camps of Chomskyan and non-Chomskyan linguistics. Their disputes are often acrimonious. Additionally, according to journalist Maya Jaggi, Chomsky is among the most quoted sources in the humanities, ranking alongside Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible.
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