March 29, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Why did the Kemeny Family had to Flee Hungary?
BASIC as you would know is an aptly chosen acronym
for Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code that represents not one
but a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages.
The whole idea behind this family of
languages is in their ease of usage.
If I was as ignorant as I was five years
ago it would have surprised me to know that this programming language was
developed by mathematicians and not by “computer scientists” in 1964.
It is only after a lot of studying it
dawned upon me that that computer science has its origins in mathematics and a
true and genuine computer scientist has got to be a mathematician first.
The two mathematicians who developed the
BASIC language were John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, both being the
professors of mathematics at the Dartmouth College which is one of the least
famous of the eight Ivy League private universities lying on the Northeastern
United States.
John G. Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungary
as Kemeny Janos Gyorgy in a Jewish family and like John von Neumann, Paul
Erdos, Leo Szilard among others, is considered as one of The Martians.
I hope you recall my bedtime story on these
Martians – essentially the Central Europeans scientists and mathematicians who
has emigrated to the United States largely as Jewish refugees escaping the
Holocaust.
Kemeny was lucky that he had a father with
foresight who understood the peril when Hitler marched into Vienna in 1938.
Starting in 1938 under the regime of Hungarian
admiral and statesman Miklos Horthy (he called himself “His Serene Highness the
Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary”) series of anti-Jewish measures were passed
that would eventually gain the status of laws following the footpath of Nuremberg
Laws that were just then passed in Germany.
Kemeny’s father was alarmed at these measures
and had the wisdom to see the nightmare that was to follow these laws.
The way history has been portrayed to us many
of us would squarely put the blame of Holocaust on one man or one party.
That would be a rather simplistic and naïve
approach to the understanding of the genocide of Holocaust that was unleashed
all across Europe.
Remember that Hitler arose through a democratic
process and was elected by the people for his views which he would be hardly be
guilty of concealing; in fact, he proudly and boldly stated his views much to
the entertainment of the masses.
Let me take you to the Hungary of 1920s
after the World War I after the Kingdom of Hungary was forced to sign the
Treaty of Trianon which led to ceding of two-thirds of its former territory and
also two-thirds of its population.
The treaty attempted to enforce the
doctrine of “self-determination of peoples” which was cut short thanks to the
spasm of communist revolution that ran across the new and already weakened
nation in March of 1919.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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