Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,922

This is the grave of John Kemeny.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1926, Kemeny grew up in a wealthy Jewish family. Obviously, the family was highly concerned with what was going on in Europe and luckily had enough money that an anti-Semitic United States would let them in. His father came to the U.S. in 1938 and the rest of the family managed to get out in 1940, which was still possible if you a Hungarian Jew, but wouldn’t be for long. Some of the family would not leave. They all died in the Holocaust.

Kemeny ended up finishing his high school years in New York City and started at Princeton in 1943. A budding young mathematician and physicist, he was recruited while still at Princeton to work on the Manhattan Project, which he did for the last year of the war. Like so many of the scientists, high ranking and low ranking, who worked on the bomb, he was a Jewish refugee. At Los Alamos, he worked under Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. He returned to Princeton after the war since, you know, he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree yet. He got that in 1946 and then did a PhD at Princeton in math, which he completed in 1949. His grad school job was as an assistant to Albert Einstein.

Well, that’s quite a pedigree. He was also a politicized figure in these years. A lot of these scientists were lefties. Not all of them of course, such as his fellow Hungarian and war monger Edward Teller. But many were. With Einstein’s encouragement, Kemeny got involved in the World Federalists movement, which was a call for a one-world government along the lines of the United Nations but much more powerful, as a response to the reality of what these scientists had wrought through their superbomb. But this went nowhere.

Kemeny became a professor at Dartmouth, hired at the full level at the age of 27, in 1953. That would not happen today. He became a textbook writer almost immediately, communicating his knowledge with loads of undergraduates and undoubtedly making a lot of money on what become a classic math textbook. This started with Introduction to Finite Mathematics in 1957 and then several more over the years.

But the reason we are here is that Kemeny came up with BASIC, along with his colleague Thomas Kurtz. This became the main computer programming language and allowed people without scientific backgrounds to use computers. This is way, way beyond my ability to describe, even in passing. I know that folks here have far more knowledge about this than I do, so I will leave it here. Suffice it to say though, it’s unlikely an idiot like myself would be writing on the internet without Kemeny and Kurtz’s work.

Later, Kemeny went into college administration and became Dartmouth’s president in 1970. He stayed in that role for 11 years and continued to teach during that time as well, which would be exceedingly rare today, as college administrators pretend like everything they are doing is for the students, which might be the biggest lie in all of academia. Mostly, they are bored with teaching and want to make a lot of money and don’t care who they hurt to do so. It’s disgusting. Kemeny also revived Dartmouth’s original mission to serve Native American populations and upped Native recruiting. As far as administrators go, he seems to have been a decent fellow. That’s the times more than anything.

Kemeny remained active until his death, but that death came pretty early. He had heart issues and that finally did him in at the age of 66, in 1992.

John Kemeny is buried in Dartmouth College Cemetery, Hanover, New Hampshire.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved in computing, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Steve Jobs is in Palo Alto, California and Grace Hopper is in Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.