John G. Kemeny
John George Kemeny (Hungarian: Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) was a Jewish-Hungarian American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing 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
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Kemeny attended the Rácz private primary school in Budapest and was a classmate of Nandor Balazs. 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 perished in the Holocaust, 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 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 Albert Einstein's mathematical assistant during graduate school. Kemeny was awarded his doctorate in 1949 for a dissertation entitled "Type-Theory vs. Set-Theory".
