Man And The Computer

Written by the brilliant John George Kemeny (1926 - 1992). Kemeny was a Jewish-Hungarian American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Widely praised by his colleagues for both the depth and the breadth of his intellect, Dr. Kemeny was selected a year after his graduation from Princeton University to be a research assistant to Albert Einstein, and he passed the first milestones of his academic career while still remarkably young. He earned a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton at 23, was made a full professor of mathematics at Dartmouth at 27, was appointed chairman of the mathematics department there at 29 and was named president of Dartmouth at 43. Dr. Kemeny was a forceful and popular leader who guided a tradition-cherishing Ivy League institution through a series of profound changes, including the admission of women in 1972. He was the author of many books. In this book, Dr. Kemeny presented his personalized view of what happened in the first 25 years of modern computers. From this, he goes on to a critical evaluation of the state of the art at its writing and the various applications of computers and concludes with an examination of what seemed possible and likely to occur in the next 20 years. "Man and the Computer" is an expanded version of the widely acclaimed Man and Nature Lectures delivered at The American Museum of Natural History in the fall of 1971.