CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is world-famous as the originator of the "Transformational Grammar" theory, a framework of principles accounting for all language-specific rules.

Since his participation in campaigns against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has also been well-known for his long career of criticism of U.S. politics and foreign policy.

In his MIT office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there were foreign language translations of his books, including Japanese editions.