Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by John G. Kemeny

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American mathematician John G. Kemeny.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

John George Kemeny was a Hungarian-born 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. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.

American - Mathematician | May 31, 1926 - December 26, 1992

Source: Wikipedia

If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.

John G. Kemeny

The only reason psychology students don't have to do more and harder mathematics than physics students is because the mathematicians haven't yet discovered ways of dealing with problems as hard as those in psychology.

John G. Kemeny

A considreable portion of my high school trigonometry course was devoted to the solution of oblique triangles... I have still not had an excuse for using my talents for solving oblique triangles. If a professional mathematician never uses these dull techniques in a highly varied career, why must all high school students devote several weeks to the subject?

John G. Kemeny