John
George Kemeny (Hungarian: Kemény János György) (May 31, 1926,
Budapest–December 26, 1992, New Hampshire), was a Hungarian-American
mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for
co-developing[1] the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas
Eugene Kurtz. He also served as the 13th President of Dartmouth
College 1970–1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college
education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that
investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979[1].
Biography Kemeny
attended primary school in Budapest, Hungary. In 1940, his father took
the Kemeny family to the United States to escape the imminent threat
to Hungarian Jews posed by the rise of Nazism. His grandfather,
however, refused to leave and perished in the Holocaust, along with an
aunt and uncle.[2]. Kemeny's family settled in New York City where he
attended George Washington High School. He graduated with the best
results in his class three years later[1]. Kemeny entered Princeton
University where he studied mathematics and philosophy, but he took a
year off during his studies to work on the Manhattan Project in Los
Alamos National Laboratory. His boss there was Richard Feynman. He
also worked there with John von Neumann. Returning to Princeton,
Kemeny graduated with his B.A. in 1947, then worked for his doctorate
under Alonzo Church. He worked as Einstein's mathematical assistant
during graduate school. Kemeny was awarded his doctorate in 1949 for a
dissertation entitled "Type-Theory vs. Set-Theory".
Kemeny was appointed to the Dartmouth Mathematics Department in 1953.
Two years later he became chairman of the Department, and held this
post until 1967. He was president of Dartmouth from 1970 to 1981, and
continued to teach undergraduate courses and to do research and
publish papers during his time as president. In 1982 he returned to
teaching full time.
Kemeny and Kurtz pioneered the use of computers for "average people".
After early experiments with the LGP-30, they invented the well-known
BASIC programming language in 1964, as well as one of the world's
first timesharing systems, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS).
In 1983, they cofounded a company called True Basic Inc. to market
True BASIC, an updated version of the language.
Dartmouth Presidency
Posted with permission from Dartmouth College
If William Jewett Tucker can be said to have "refounded Dartmouth,"
then certainly it was John Kemeny who began the institution's
"transformation." A Hungarian by birth, a Princetonian by education
and an esteemed mathematician, his appointment was met with enthusiasm
by the faculty but with skepticism by the alumni, some of whom felt
that he could not understand the Dartmouth experience. Yet he
succeeded in realizing the ambitious goals of his presidency while
teaching two courses a year, and never missing a class.
Reversing a 203-year tradition of single sex education, John Kemeny
presided over the coeducation of Dartmouth in 1972. He also instituted
the "Dartmouth Plan" of year-round operations, thereby allowing a
significant increase in the size of the student body without a
corresponding increase in the College's physical facilities. During
his administration, Dartmouth became more proactive in recruiting and
retaining minority students[1] and revived its founding commitment to
provide education for Native Americans. The co-inventor, with Thomas
Kurtz, of the BASIC computer language, President Kemeny made Dartmouth
a pioneer in student use of computers, equating computer literacy with
reading literacy.
During what was, for most American colleges and universities, a
tumultuous period of student protest, Dartmouth enjoyed a period of
relative calm due in large part to John Kemeny's appeal to students
and his practice of seeking consensus on vital college issues.
John Kemeny died at the age of 66, the result of heart failure in
Lebanon, New Hampshire[1] in 1992. He had lived in Etna, near the
Dartmouth campus. |