John Kemeny

John Kemeny (born May 31, 1926, Budapest, Hungary—died December 26, 1992, Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and computer scientist. He emigrated to the U.S. with his family at age 14. He took a year off from his undergraduate studies at Princeton University to work on the Manhattan Project and was later a research assistant to Albert Einstein. He received a Ph.D. in 1949 and joined the Dartmouth College faculty in 1953, where he worked to develop the mathematics department. In the mid-1960s he and Thomas E. Kurtz (born 1928) developed the BASIC computer programming language. He was a pioneer in the promotion of “new math” and the use of computers in education. He served as president of Dartmouth (1970–81).