Intruiging...

So, I was perusing the New Yok Times Paperback Nonfiction Best Seller list and came across a book on American foreign policy by the "father of modern linguistics," Noam Chomsky. What is surprising is not his book, but the fact that in the most recent chapter of my Finite Automata and Formal Languages class we learned how to convert context-free grammars into Chomsky Normal Form. I, however, never knew the history behind who codified this normal form. I never would have thought it had roots in actual linguistics or anything like that, since we've only used grammars to define context-free languages, which by definition are languages accepted by Push-Down Automata.