Linguist George Lakoff was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on 24 May 1941 to Herman and Ida Lakoff. After earning a Ph.D. in linguistics by Indiana University in 1966, Lakoff taught at Harvard University (1965–1969) and the University of Michigan (1969–1971), and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1971–1972). Since 1972, he has served as Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. More recently, Professor Lakoff helped found and is a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute, a nonprofit research and educational institution dedicated to progressive politics and social reform. He is married to Kathleen Frumkin.

Lakoff’s significant books include Metaphors We Live By (1980, with Mark Johnson), More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989, with Mark Turner), Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (1996; 2nd ed., 2002), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999, with Mark Johnson), Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (2000, with Rafael Núñez), and Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2004).