Biography

John George Kemeny's father, Tibor Kemeny, was involved in grass cultivation, seed trade, and the banking industry. His mother was Lucia Fried. The family lived in Budapest, where Kemeny attended elementary school at the Rácz private school on Vilmos Császár Street (now Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Street), where his desk mate for several years was Nándor Balázs. He went to high school at Berzsenyi Dániel High School. In 1940, after the adoption of the second Jewish law in Hungary, the Kemeny family emigrated to the United States.

Career

John George Kemeny completed his high school education in New York. During World War II, he was drafted into military service and sent to Los Alamos, where he worked on the Manhattan Project as an assistant to the later Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. After his discharge in 1947, he graduated from Princeton University, earning his doctorate in logic in 1949. Following his doctorate, Kemeny served as an assistant to Albert Einstein, working with him on the unified field theory.After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1949, Kemeny worked at the Princeton Naval Research Laboratory and then at the university's philosophy department. Besides John von Neumann, he was also greatly influenced by Bertrand Russell. Later, he joined the faculty of the University of Kent.At the age of 27, Kemeny was invited to Dartmouth College as a mathematics professor, and two years later, he became the head of the Mathematics Department. In 1963, he and Thomas Kurtz developed the first time-sharing computer system, which significantly improved processor utilization and system performance. For this achievement, Kemeny was awarded the IBM's first Louis Robinson Award in 1990. He and Thomas Kurtz also co-developed the BASIC (Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language, which became the built-in language for many computers in the 1980s. In 1970, Kemeny became the president of Dartmouth College, a position he held until 1981​