Linguist John Lyons remarked that within a few decades of publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become "the most dynamic and influential" school of thought in the field.[220] His work in automata theory has become well known in computer science and he is much cited within the field of computational linguistics.[221] By the 1970s, his work had also come to exert a considerable influence on philosophy.[222] Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in various fields of study; the Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages, and this hierarchy has also generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.[223] Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.[224]

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels Kaj Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar … with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel Lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System."[36] Computer scientist Donald Knuth read Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and was influenced by it. "I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 ... Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!"[31]