John George Kemeny (born Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) was a Hungarian-born

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, and educator best known for co-developing the

BASIC programming language BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. Dartmouth BASIC, The original version was created by John ...

in 1964 with

Thomas E. Kurtz Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born February 22, 1928) is a retired Dartmouth College, Dartmouth professor of mathematics and computer scientist, who along with his colleague John G. Kemeny set in motion the then revolutionary concept of making computers a ...

and

Mary Kenneth Keller Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M. (December 17, 1913 – January 10, 1985) was an American Catholic religious sister, educator and pioneer in computer science. She was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in computer science in the United States. Keller an ...

. Kemeny served as the 13th President of

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that investigated the

Three Mile Island accident The Three Mile Island accident was a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island, Unit 2 (TMI-2) reactor in Pennsylvania, United States. It began at 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979. It is the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclea ...

in 1979. According to

György Marx György Marx (25 May 1927 – 2 December 2002) was a Hungarian physicist, astrophysicist, science historian and professor. He discovered the lepton numbers and established the law of lepton flavor conservation. Life He was the first non-Briti ...

he was one of The Martians.

Early life

Born in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

, into a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family, Kemeny attended the Rácz private primary school in Budapest and was a classmate of

Nándor Balázs Nándor Balázs ( hu, Balázs Nándor László; July 7, 1926August 16, 2003) was a Hungarian-American physicist, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (from 1995). Early life and education Balázs attended to the Rácz private ...

. In 1938 his father left for the United States alone. In 1940, he took the whole Kemeny family to the United States when the adoption of the second anti-Jewish law in Hungary became imminent. His grandfather, however, refused to leave and was murdered in the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

, along with an aunt and uncle. 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. In 1943, Kemeny entered

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

where he studied mathematics and philosophy, but he took a year off during his studies to work on the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

, where his boss was

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superflu ...

. He also worked there with

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

. Returning to Princeton, Kemeny graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1946 after completing a senior thesis, titled "Equivalent logical systems", under the supervision of

Alonzo Church Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scienc ...

. He then remained at Princeton to pursue graduate studies and received a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in mathematics in 1949 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Type-theory vs. set-theory", also under the supervision of Alonzo Church. He worked as

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

's mathematical assistant during graduate school.

Career

Kemeny was appointed to the Dartmouth Mathematics Department as a full professor in 1953, at the age of 27. Two years later he became chairman of the department, and held this post until 1967. Kemeny ventured into curriculum development when he introduced Finite mathematics courses. He teamed with

Gerald L. Thompson Gerald L. Thompson (born November 25, 1923, Rolfe, Iowa; died November 9, 2009 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was the IBM Professor of Systems and Operations Research (Emeritus) in the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University. From 194 ...

and

J. Laurie Snell James Laurie Snell, often cited as J. Laurie Snell, (January 15, 1925 in Wheaton, Illinois – March 19, 2011 in Hanover, New Hampshire) was an American mathematician. Biography J. Laurie Snell was the son of Roy J. Snell, Roy Snell, an adventure ...

to write ''Introduction to Finite Mathematics'' (1957) for students of biology and social sciences. The Dartmouth mathematics department professors also wrote ''Finite Mathematical Structures'' (1959) and ''Finite Mathematics with Business Applications'' (1962). Other colleges and universities followed this lead and several more textbooks in ''Finite Mathematics'' were composed elsewhere. The topic of

Markov chain A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happe ...

s was particularly popular so Kemeny teamed with J. Laurie Snell to publish ''Finite Markov Chains'' (1960) to provide an introductory college textbook. Considering the advances using

potential theory In mathematics and mathematical physics, potential theory is the study of harmonic functions. The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics when it was realized that two fundamental forces of nature known at the time, namely gravi ...

obtained by G. A. Hunt, they wrote ''Denumerable Markov Chains'' in 1966. This textbook, suitable for advanced seminars,Preface, page vi was followed by a second edition in 1976 when an additional chapter on

random field In physics and mathematics, a random field is a random function over an arbitrary domain (usually a multi-dimensional space such as \mathbb^n). That is, it is a function f(x) that takes on a random value at each point x \in \mathbb^n(or some other d ...

s by David Griffeath was included. Kemeny and Kurtz were pioneers in the use of computers for ordinary people. After early experiments with ALGOL 30 and DOPE on the

LGP-30 The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, was an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California (a division of General Precision Inc.), and so ...

, they invented the

in 1964, as well as one of the world's first

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...

systems, the

Dartmouth Time-Sharing System The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) is a discontinued operating system first developed at Dartmouth College between 1963 and 1964. It was the first successful large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented, and was also the system for wh ...

(DTSS). In 1974, the

American Federation of Information Processing Societies The American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) was an umbrella organization of professional societies established on May 10, 1961, and dissolved in 1990. Its mission was to advance knowledge in the field of information science, ...

gave an award to Kemeny and Kurtz at the

National Computer Conference The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the omputerfield ...

for their work on BASIC and time-sharing. BASIC was the language used in most software written during the rise of the Apple II, the Commodore, the TRS-80, and the IBM PCs throughout the 80s. Kemeny 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. He presided over the coeducation of Dartmouth in 1972. He also instituted the "Dartmouth Plan" of year-round operations, thereby allowing more students without more buildings. During his administration, Dartmouth became more proactive in recruiting and retaining minority students and revived its founding commitment to provide education for American Indians. Kemeny made Dartmouth a pioneer in student use of computers, equating computer literacy with reading literacy. In 1982 he returned to teaching full-time. In 1983, Kemeny and Kurtz co-founded a company called True BASIC, Inc. to market

True BASIC True BASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language descended from Dartmouth BASIC—the original BASIC. Both were created by college professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. History True BASIC traces its history to an offsh ...

, an updated version of the language.

Death

John G Kemeny plaque Bp05 Bajcsy-Zsilinszky38

John Kemeny died at the age of 66, the result of heart failure in

Lebanon, New Hampshire Lebanon is a city in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 14,282 at the 2020 census, up from 13,151 at the 2010 census. Lebanon is in western New Hampshire, south of Hanover, near the Connecticut River. It is the home ...

on December 26, 1992. He had lived in Etna, near the Dartmouth Campus.

References

External links

The Papers of John G. Kemeny in the Dartmouth College Library
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20041210091532/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/features/succession/ Dartmouth Wheelock Successionbr>Bio at Bellevue C.C. siteA sketch of John Kemeny for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
* *
True Basic Inc. information
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kemeny, John 1926 births 1992 deaths Manhattan Project people American computer scientists Jewish American scientists Princeton University alumni Dartmouth College faculty Presidents of Dartmouth College BASIC programming language Programming language designers People associated with nuclear power Hungarian emigrants to the United States Jews who emigrated to escape Nazism Hungarian Jews People from Pest, Hungary Mathematical economists Mathematics educators 20th-century Hungarian mathematicians 20th-century American academics

Early life

Career

Death

See also

References

External links