John George Kemeny

John George Kemeny (born Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College 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 in 1979.

Early life and education Born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family, Kemeny attended the Rácz private primary school in Budapest and was a classmate of Nándor Balázs. In 1938 his father left for the United States alone. In 1940, he took the whole Kemeny family to the United States

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. He then remained at Princeton to pursue graduate studies and received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Type-theory vs. set-theory", also under the supervision of Alonzo Church.

United World Federalists was the movement through which Kemeny met his future wife, then-Smith student Jean Alexander. This textbook, suitable for advanced seminars, was followed by a second edition in 1976 when an additional chapter on random fields 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, they invented the BASIC programming language in 1964, as well as one of the world's first time-sharing systems, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS). In 1974, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies gave an award to Kemeny and Kurtz at the National Computer Conference for their work on BASIC and time-sharing. Kemeny had a "BASIC" license plate.

Kemeny served as president of Dartmouth from 1970 to 1981; he 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 He had lived in Etna, near the Dartmouth campus.

Works Kemeny, J. G. (1962). Finite Mathematics with Business Applications. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.