John G. Kemeny; Creator of BASIC Computer Language

LEBANON, N.H. —  John G. Kemeny, a former president of Dartmouth College, co-creator of the widely used computer language BASIC and a scientist whose involvement in nuclear energy began with the Manhattan Project and extended through an investigation of the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, is dead.

The distinguished mathematician died Saturday, apparently of a heart attack, a Dartmouth spokesman said. He was 66.

Kemeny was a research assistant to Albert Einstein while studying at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate when he was only 23.

Earlier, as an Army soldier during World War II, he worked as an assistant in the theoretical division of the Los Alamos nuclear project that developed the atomic bomb.

Kemeny served as Dartmouth’s 13th president from 1970 to 1981, when he stepped down to return to teaching. He guided the university through a series of changes, including the admission of women in 1972, and recommitted the school to its founding mission of educating American Indians.

His tenure also was marked by a growing conservative sentiment that came to dominate the New England campus. When he stepped down in 1981, Kemeny warned of the intolerance he saw within that movement.

Kemeny “pushed the fields of mathematics and computing to new heights, just as he raised the stature of Dartmouth during a decade of change in the 1970s,” Dartmouth President James Freedman said.

Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungary, and immigrated to the United States in 1940. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945 and quickly joined the Army.

He was graduated from Princeton in 1947 and earned his doctorate from the school two years later.

Kemeny and a colleague at Dartmouth, Prof. Thomas Kurtz, invented BASIC computer language in 1964. It remains a major tool in teaching computer programming.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter named Kemeny to head a 12-member commission that investigated the accident at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant at Middletown, Pa. The Kemeny Commission, as it came to be called, was highly critical of the nuclear power industry and its federal regulators.