- It is really interesting to see how much a person can do for a scientific discipline. His name is directly associated with linguistics.
- Some of his ideas even made their way into other disciplines
- e.g. computer science: the Chomsky hierarchy had a direct influence on programming language development (which I happen to find really interesting).
- At the university, I am taking courses in computer science, computational linguistics and psychology, Noam Chomsky got mentioned at least in one lecture in all of those disciplines.
- He is 94 years old now (as of 2023) but he still has the ‘energy’ (or at least to motivation) to talk about recent issues publicly.
- He supports anarchist ideas.
- He popularized the idea of literate programming and he is a strong advocate for it.
- Don’t write code for computers, write code for other humans!
- To him, it is important that we develop an intuitive understanding of almost everything, including complicated concepts.
- Write everything twice, once in the formal way and once in the intuitive way, with examples.
- He created TeX.
- He is interested in typography.
- He has two books on religion!
- He writes ‘Knuth reward checks’, if you find mistakes (e.g. typesetting) in his books.