john kemeny :: essays research papers

JOHN KEMENY MATHEMATICIAN John Kemeny was born on may 13, 1926, in Budapest Hungary. He attended primary give instruction in Budapest. He came from a Jewish family and in 1940, due to the Holocaust, Kemenys capture moved the family to the U.S. Kemenys family moved to New York, and John attended school in New York City. He attended Princeton University where he studied maths and philosophy. He took a year off during his undergraduate course to establish on the Manhattan project in Los Alamos. Johns boss was Richard Feynman and he also worked with Von Neumann. He returned to Princeton, and graduated with a B.A. in 1947. He so worked for his doctorate under the supervision of Alonzo Church. Kemeny received his doctorate in 1949 for a dissertation entitled Type-Theory vs. Set-Theory. He was appointed as Albert Einsteins mathematical assistant while he was still a doctoral student. John continued to study both mathematics and philosophy, and became a prof of philosophy at Princeton in 1951. In 1953 he was appointed to the mathematics department at Dartmouth, and in two years he became moderate of the department. He held his position until 1967. He was president of Dartmouth between 1970, 1981, and 1982. He presently returned to be a full-time teacher. Kemeny co-invented the Basic(Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) electronic computer code. It was in 1963 that John and Thomas Kurtz decided that they wanted to give students unaccented access to computing. They designed the first system so that many students could map a single computer at the same time. It was designed to cater students to write programs easily. The first Basic program was run at Dartmouth at 2am on May 4, 1964. Kemeny also introduced a new teaching innovation. He developed a Finite mathematics course including topics that we still substance abuse today. Some of the topics were logic, probability and matrix algebra.