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[ShazzieB]

20. I learned about his theory of language acquisition when I was in college.

I was an English major but took several courses in linguistics that were offered in the English Dept. (I loved linguistics and might have changed my major to that, if it had been an option without transferring to a different school. It wasn't, so I didn't.)

This was all the way back in the 1970s, and he was already very well known for his theory of language acquisition: that humans are born with a predisposition to learn language, that our brains are pre-wired for this and we're born with the basic rules for language intact. As far as I know, that theory is just about universally accepted all these years later.

I'm a lot less familiar with his other work, but his work in the field of linguistics alone was highly impressive and impactful.