His academic work is so far removed from what we do day to day, it would be difficult to explain why this post must be. His political activism is not the reason, though we admire his taking the side of the underdog, being friend to the friendless, giving voice to the powerless.  When someone leads as he has led, he deserves a birthday tribute.  Do yourself a favor and take 5-10 minutes to read this in its entirety, or at least these last two paragraphs:

When I was a second-year graduate student at M.I.T., Chomsky taught a class on philosophy, which I was lucky enough to sit in on. The class itself was an event, almost a circus; people came from all over Boston, not just M.I.T. Grad students in my department (brain and cognitive science) would walk over en masse, facetiously chanting, as if it was a mantra, “Noam… Noam… Noam.” We would poke fun at Chomsky’s body language, and his teaching habits, as if we were above it all. But the truth is that few have ever been to a course that stimulating, before or since. To my eternal chagrin, I became exceptionally busy that semester (working on a language acquisition project that had just taken off), and had no choice but to drop the class when I realized I wouldn’t have time to write the required paper.

Sometimes I think of my whole career since as a kind of penance, still trying to wend my way through the philosophical stage that Noam had set. None of the questions Chomsky that has posed has yet been fully answered, to his satisfaction or to anybody else’s, but no scholar of the mind has ever been more influential. Chomsky may not always have the right answers. But he has always had the wisdom to pose the right questions.