Chomsky

[John Myhill]

Relating to the comment from AR (beaumar at HOTMAIL.COM, copied below), my
father, a mathematical logician of the same name as me, met and spent a
year around Chomsky at Princeton in the late 1950's, when Chomsky was
attempting to pass himself off as a mathematician. The real mathematicians
there observed with
amusement that Chomsky would attempt to act like a mathematician, throwing
around terms designed to impress, when speaking to philosophers, political
scientists, etc., but when a real mathematician entered the conversation,
Chomsky would either making an excuse to leave or change the topic to
something like politics.

John




>You know, Funknetters, I don't know that I'd call myself either
>a formalist or a functionalist.  But one of the most damning things
>I know about Chomsky is that he *never* goes to LSA, the one place where he
>might face genuine criticism.  A friend of mine, a formalist,
>used to argue that he simply never went to academic conferences.
>
>This year, I discover that this is clearly untrue.  Chomsky is going
>to talk at the MLA, to those who do literature.   It's only his own that he
>refuses to talk to at conferences.
>
>
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