Mathematician, Educator, and Philosopher
1926–1992

Devoting his career to mathematics and education, John G. Kemeny served as president of Dartmouth College for more than a decade. He also taught at the school for many years and is remembered for his books. Skilled in the field of mathematics, he teamed with fellow professor Thomas E. Kurtz to create the BASIC programming language.

Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 31, 1926. He and his family were Jewish and fled Hungary in 1940 to escape the Nazis. He immigrated to the United States and finished high school in New York City, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1945.

In 1943 Kemeny was admitted to Princeton University, where he majored in mathematics and minored in philosophy. His studies were interrupted when he joined the U.S. Army's Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico, but in 1947 he graduated from Princeton and...