Lebanon, New Hampshire, United States. Thomas Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, dies. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1950. In the summer of 1951, he attended the Institute for Numerical Analysis, a branch of NIST at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the guidance of Professor Forman Acton, an engineer who instilled in him a passion for computers. From 1952 to 1956, Kurtz was a computer science assistant and researcher at Princeton University, where he began writing programs for an IBM computer. In 1956, he earned a doctorate in statistical mathematics from Princeton and then transferred to Dartmouth University at the behest of John George Kemeny, then chair of the mathematics department. BASIC was invented at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It is an easy-to-use and easily learned programming language: Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC, which would remain the most widespread and widely used programming language for many years. The first BASIC program was executed on May 1, 1964.
