John G. Kemeny

• Born: May 31, 1926
• Place of Birth: Budapest, Hungary
• Died: December 26, 1992
• Place of Death: Lebanon, New Hampshire

John G. Kemeny

• Codesigner of the BASIC programming language

• Primary Company/Organization: Dartmouth College

Introduction

John G. Kemeny, who spent his career as a mathematician, computer programming educator, and president of Dartmouth College, was coauthor of the BASIC programming language, which he and colleague Thomas Kurtz wrote and later made more powerful with True BASIC. Their invention of the first computer time-sharing system, Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), was equally important, adapted by universities and government agencies and foreshadowing the networked environment in which we live today.

Early Life

John George Kemeny was born in Budapest on May 31, 1926. His father left in 1938, fearing the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, and his wife, daughter, and son followed in 1940. Kemeny arrived in New York City in 1940, attended George Washington High School, and graduated in 1943 at the top of his class. He entered Princeton University, studying mathematics, but one year later he was drafted and sent to Los Alamos, Mexico, to work on the Manhattan Project as a human “computer.” The computer center where Kemeny worked had nothing more advanced than IBM bookkeeping calculators that were fed punch cards. Simple computations could take a week.

At Los Alamos, Kemeny heard John von Neumann speak. Von Neumann outlined his vision for a fully electronic computer using a binary number system, with internal memory for data processing and storage. For the human computers and others attending his lecture, the speed and accuracy of calculations that would result were exciting yet, for Kemeny, seemed like a dream he might not see realized in his lifetime.

In 1947, Kemeny earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton with the highest grade point average from that institution in twenty years. By the age of twenty-three, he had earned his Ph.D, despite the year he had spent at Los Alamos. He was chief assistant to Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948–1949, where von Neumann was also working. In the summer of 1953, during a consulting job at the Rand Corporation, Kemeny had a chance to work with and write program language for a copy of von Neumann's computer, the JONIAC.

Life's Work

In 1953, at age twenty-seven, Kemeny took a position at Dartmouth College as a professor of mathematics. He would make his career at Dartmouth, becoming department chair at twenty-nine and president of the college at forty-three. Dartmouth had no computer when Kemeny joined the faculty, so he would drive more than one hundred miles each way to use a computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he saw the advent of Fortran and could see the possibilities of programming languages that made it easier for all humans to access the power of these machines.

In 1959, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation granted half a million dollars to Dartmouth to pay for the mathematics half of the building that the mathematics department was to share with the psychology department. The grant was awarded because of the work of thirty-two-year-old Kemeny. Kemeny revitalized the Dartmouth mathematics department; in 1959, many of the department's faculty were his appointees, and he changed the curriculum to incorporate abstract algebra, probability, topology, and other fields that, at the time, were new. He created two programs, one designed for mathematics majors and the other liberal arts majors. As a teacher, he was demanding, challenging, and effective, with a “cornball” sense of humor and no patience with professors who looked down on freshman classes or refused to do research.

Also in 1959, Dartmouth got its first computer, an LGP-30. Computer science was expanding beyond wartime decoding machines and punch-card-fed calculators. By the 1960s, expectations were greater, based on the insights of visionaries such as von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Kemeny himself. In an article published in Scientific American, “Man Viewed as a Machine,” Kemeny described the eventual design of a universal machine that, “given enough time he can learn to do anything.” Assembler languages had been written, but they were difficult to learn. Fortran was for scientists, COBOL was for business people, and both were intimidatingly technical. Kemeny and fellow faculty member Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth understood computers and shared the dedication of MIT's John McCarthy to time sharing, wanting to give all the students and faculty access to computers. This led Kemeny and Kurtz to develop a system to give multiple users access to the central computer from remote terminals; up and running by 1964, the system was dubbed the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS).

Kemeny and Kurtz realized, however, that time sharing needed to be joined by another tool: a high-level language for nonprogrammers. Kemeny broached the idea to Kurtz, worried that they would be teaching a language that nobody could use outside Dartmouth since Fortran was the standard in the world. In 1962, Kemeny and a student assistant, Sidney Marshall, had created DOPE, the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, but DOPE had flopped. Kemeny and Kurtz then developed Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, BASIC. The language used commands based on plain English and high school algebra, requiring only minimal learning of syntax. It was interactive, with real-time error messages that the programmer could correct on the spot. No longer was it necessary for users to labor endlessly on code, get a few minutes of “run time” (access to the computer), watch the program fail, then trudge back to try to locate the programming error again and again. BASIC also had a built-in random number generator, making it easy to create games. Kemeny also tied the university computing center to faculty offices and areas where students could use the computer through telephone-linked terminals.

When Kemeny became Dartmouth's president in 1970, he replaced John Sloan Dickey, who during his quarter century as president was a major transformer of Dartmouth's infrastructure and endowments. In contrast to the Waspish, traditional headmaster figure cut by Dickey, Kemeny was a Jewish intellectual immigrant, former assistant to Einstein, and computer hobbyist who was expected to speed change for the college's thirty-eight hundred students during a time of social change, perhaps even to bring Dartmouth into line with other Ivy League schools in offering undergraduate education to women. Kemeny committed to increasing enrollment of Native Americans and also saw the admission of women to the college, in 1972.

Kemeny's tenure as Dartmouth president lasted eleven years. He converted Dartmouth to a trimester system that allowed students time for off-campus projects and provided more efficient use of dormitories and teaching centers. He recruited minorities, abandoned the school's American Indian mascot (despite alumni protests), saw the college transition to a coeducational institution, and rejected the rise of conservatism on the campus in the final years of his presidency, criticizing the conservative Dartmouth Review and warning students in 1981 against intolerance.

Jimmy Carter appointed Kemeny as head of the commission that investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident of 1979. Kemeny's commission found that federal regulators and industry were both responsible for lax safety standards. The commission's October 1979 report sought basic change in reactor construction and operation. Three Mile Island culminated an antinuclear-power movement that had been growing for several decades. Coming just after the coincidental release of the movie The China Syndrome, about an accident at a nuclear power plant, the accident at Three Mile Island was met by an antinuclear backlash that placed the future of nuclear energy in doubt. To calm fears, Carter chose his commission, surprising even Kemeny, who had had no expertise in nuclear energy, when selecting him as chair. The commission found that the technology was not at fault and was in fact quite good. It also learned that an operator error had transformed a minor incident into a major accident and that the operators had never received training on how to deal with the small failure. Kemeny's commission recommended that engineers not be allowed to do training (Kemeny believed that engineers are incomprehensible at best). The commission also recommended that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry change their attitudes and practices or expect another near meltdown. Carter took the commission's advice, the industry stabilized, and no other major accident occurred at any of the more than one hundred reactors in the United States. However, no new reactors were built for thirty years afterward.

In 1981, Kemeny resigned as president of Dartmouth to resume teaching in the mathematics department until 1990. After returning to teaching, Kemeny took stock of the use of computers especially in education. However, his focus remained on making computers available to all users, and the slow pace of progress in computer education frustrated him. Moreover, over time, versions of BASIC had proliferated, and some were not particularly good, giving BASIC a bad reputation. When the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) decided to set a standard, the two saw an opportunity to revitalize their creation. Between 1983 and 1985, Kemeny and Kurtz went back to work and produced a more powerful version of their original BASIC, True BASIC.

Personal Life

In 1950, Kemeny married Jean Alexander, and the couple had two children: a son, Robert, and a daughter, Jennifer. He died in 1992 following a heart attack at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He was sixty-six years old. Speaking after her husband's death, Jean, the author of both fiction and nonfiction, described John's personality and interests as follows: “He liked science fiction, football games, shrimp, all kinds of puzzles, Agatha Christie, and solitude (for two). He did not enjoy socializing. Before he retired, John recognized only two flowers, the tulip and the rose, and two pieces of music, the 1812 Overture and ‘Poor Little Buttercup.’ These last years he had time to enjoy Mozart, wildflowers, pileated woodpeckers, eclipses. Sometimes he liked just to sit still and think.”

Above all, computers and programming were Kemeny's greatest hobbies. He spent a career at Dartmouth during which he witnessed and contributed significantly not only to the computer revolution but also to profound social changes, including the expansion of Dartmouth's education to a diverse population of students through both liberalized admissions policies and the extension of computing to users who would otherwise have had little opportunity for access. Over the course of his career, Kemeny was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees and many awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1967), the New York Academy of Sciences Award (1984), the Computer Pioneer Award from the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1986), and the Louis Robinson Award (1990).

Bibliography

Hauben, Jay Robert. “John G. Kemeny: BASIC and DTSS; Everyone a Programmer.” Computer Pioneers. Ed. John A. N. Lee. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995. N. pag. Print.

“High Math at Hanover.” Time, 23 Feb. 1959, time.com/archive/6888426/education-high-math-at-hanover/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

"Kemeny, John (George), 1926–1992." Dartmouth College, 2024, archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/708. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Kemeny, Jean. It's Different at Dartmouth. Brattleboro: Greene, 1979. Print.

Kemeny, John. Man and the Computer. New York: Scribner, 1972. Print.

Kemeny, John. “Man Viewed as a Machine.” Scientific American 192 (1955): 58–67. Print.

Mahoney, Matt. “Notes on a Meltdown.” Technology Review, 20 Oct. 2009, www.technologyreview.com/2009/10/20/29466/notes-on-a-meltdown/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Slater, Robert. Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge: MIT, 1989. Print.