John G. Kemeny: Computing Pioneer

Abstract

John G. Kemeny, co-author of Basic and co-developer of the Dartmouth TimeSharing System, returned to full-time teaching in June 1982 after completing 11 years as President of Dartmouth College. In 1979 he was selected by President Jimmy Carter to chair the Presidential Commission to investigate the Three Mile Island Accident. The commission's report, submitted in October 1979, was highly critical of the nuclear power industry and its federal regulators. A member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1953, John Kemeny was inaugurated thirteenth president on March 1, 1970, at the age of 43. He served as chairman of Dartmouth's Department of Mathematics from 1955 to 1967, building it into one nationally recognized for leadership in both undergraduate and graduate instruction. Deeply committed to teaching, John Kemeny continued during his term as president to teach two courses each year. As President of Dartmouth, John Kemeny moved the all-male institution to coed status; renewed the College's founding commitment to educating significant numbers of Indian Americans; began the Dartmouth Plan for year-round operation; and initiated a program of continuing education in liberal studies for business and professional people known as the Dartmouth Institute. As chairman of mathematics at Dartmouth, John Kemeny helped guide Dartmouth to national leadership in educational uses of computing. He also introduced finite mathematics as an important alternative to calculus for students in the social sciences. A native of Budapest, Hungary, John Kemeny came to the United States in 1940. During World War II, while still in his teens, he interrupted his undergraduate study at Princeton to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N. M. Later, as a graduate student at Princeton, he served as research assistant to Albert Einstein. He received both his bachelor's and doctor's degrees from Princeton, both in logic. In June 1982 John Kemeny spoke at a conference sponsored by the Sloan Foundation at Williams College devoted to the relation between calculus and discrete mathematics in the first two years of the undergraduate curriculum. Following that conference, we interviewed him for TYCMJ in his Dartmouth office, just before the first of his two regular classes in Dartmouth's summer term.