Born in Budapest, Hungary, Kemeny emigrated to the United States in 1940. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Princeton University and during World War II worked in the computing center of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, assisting other pioneers in computer technology such as John von Neumann. After the war, Kemeny worked on his doctorate at Princeton University, helping Albert Einstein (1879-1955) with research work. With the advent of the astonishing breakthroughs in computer technology during the early 1950s, numerous computer systems were being installed across the United States. Kemeny realized such a large number of computers created a need to teach computing in an educational environment and believed that an understanding of computers would be as necessary in life as being able to read and write. In the early 1960s, Kemeny became chairman of the department of mathematics at Dartmouth College, in New...