John G. Kemeny | Biography

John G. Kemeny, a mathematician and college president, pioneered "new math" and the use of computers in general education. As a teenager he worked with American mathematician John Neumann on the United States Government's Manhattan Project and, as a graduate student, he was a research assistant for American physicist Albert Einstein. Working with Thomas Eugene Kurtz, a colleague at Dartmouth College, he coauthored the BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer programming language. Though intended only for Dartmouth mathematics students, BASIC became the world's most well-known programming language.

John George Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 31, 1926, to Tibor and Lucy Kemeny. He lived in Budapest with his parents and sister until 1940, when his father, fearing an imminent German invasion, took his family to the United States. At the time, Kemeny spoke three languages, none of which were English. Nevertheless, when he graduated from high school in 1943, he led his class scholastically. He entered Princeton University, but his studies were interrupted in 1945, the year he became a naturalized American citizen, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Employed as a military computer (a person who did mathematical computations), he was assigned to the computing center of the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. His superior, von Neumann, was involved in calculating the blast characteristics of the atomic bomb in order to determine how to detonate it in the most effective way. After the war, Kemeny returned to Princeton, where he served as the president of the German Club and the Roundtable. He graduated at the top of his class in 1947. While pursuing his doctorate, which he received from Princeton in 1949, he worked as an assistant to the American mathematician Alonzo Church in mathematics research and to Einstein on the unified field theory. On November 5, 1950, Kemeny married Jean Alexander. They had two children, Jennifer and Robert.

Throughout his professional life, Kemeny was an enthusiastic educator. He joined the Princeton faculty as an instructor in mathematical logic immediately after earning his Ph.D. and was a teacher in one capacity or another for the rest of his life. He moved to Dartmouth College in 1953 and remained there until shortly before his death. As chair of the Dartmouth Department of Mathematics, Kemeny took steps to change the methods of education in math. He was a pioneer in doing away with courses based on drills and basic problem solving. He stressed the efficient use of reference materials, introduced first-year differential calculus, and developed Dartmouth's first doctoral program in mathematics.

With professor Thomas E. Kurtz, Kemeny developed a time-sharing scheme in the early 1960s to make computers available to Dartmouth students. Then, computers were large institutional machines, but they were becoming more common and it was clear that they had more uses than their original computational purpose. One of the problems with making computers available to students was that computers were only valuable to people who knew how to program them. At the time, it took months or years to learn how to program a computer in machine language, and the few higher-level languages available, such as FORTRAN, were not much better. A language that could be used by students was clearly needed.

To meet this need, Kemeny and Kurtz gradually developed BASIC. The first program written in BASIC ran on a time-shared GE 225 computer on May 1, 1964, at 4 A.M. (Computer time was valuable and had to be taken whenever available.) Since BASIC was initially developed for the use of Dartmouth students, and since the students had ready access to the authors in case of trouble, Kemeny and Kurtz were able to do a quick and thorough job of testing and modifying the language.

Neither Kemeny nor Kurtz intended BASIC for public use. It was meant for non-expert students, but was also designed so they could use it when they left the college. Never intending to profit from the invention, Kemeny and Kurtz put it in the public domain. Dartmouth copyrighted it but made it available at no cost.

BASIC had advantages over other available high-level languages. It was adaptable for general purposes and was easy for people with little computer or math background to learn. Because of this, it swiftly became the most popular programming language ever written. In 1965, General Electric adopted BASIC for its time-sharing system. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a proliferation of computer time-sharing in education and BASIC was commonly the language of choice. When personal computers arrived, a host of BASIC versions were written by different developers, many of them inferior to the original and all violating the rules of structure that Kemeny and Kurtz had laid down. Disdainful of pretenders and alarmed at the effect the counterfeit languages were having on BASIC's industry reputation, Kemeny and Kurtz began work in 1983 on a new generation of BASIC, called True BASIC. They formed the company True BASIC, Inc., and began shipping copies on March, 1985. Through the company, Kemeny also developed other software packages for personal computers in high schools and colleges.

Through his influence as a lecturer and officer of the Mathematical Association of America, Kemeny worked tirelessly to introduce "new math" in American public schools. In 1967, he resigned as chair of the Dartmouth Department of Mathematics to become Coordinator of Educational Plans and Development, in charge of revising the curriculum of the entire school. In 1970, he was elected president of the College. He placed as a condition on his accepting the presidency that he be allowed to continue teaching his classes in mathematics and philosophy.

Kemeny's political and ethical beliefs were always very close to the surface. He was deeply liberal and felt that Dartmouth should be reaching out to the community to a much greater degree than it did. In addition to making the College coeducational in 1972, he changed enrollment policies to ensure opportunities for minorities and poor students. He also involved himself with groups protesting the Vietnam War and other issues, suspending all academic activities at Dartmouth during the "strike week" that followed the shooting of students by National Guard troops at Kent State University.

Kemeny was popular with many students for his accessibility and his liberal policies. But many alumni, fond of Dartmouth's traditions, were shaken by Kemeny's turning the small men's school into a year-round coeducational university, in addition to his many smaller changes. When Kemeny did away with Dartmouth's Indian mascot, which he considered offensive, conservative alumni protested.

Kemeny's professional affiliations included memberships in the Association for Symbolic Logic, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Mathematical Society. He was also an associate editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. In 1979, Kemeny was appointed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter to head the Federal commission that investigated the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. The commission's report was highly critical of the nuclear power industry and its regulators. In 1981, he returned full-time to teaching, his first love, from which he retired in 1990. Kemeny died in Lebanon, New Hampshire, on December 26, 1992, at the age of 66.