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Frontispiece, xvi, 781 pp; 8 figs. Original blue cloth. There is creasing of some pages in the margins. Good, in dust jacket. The dust jacket is quite worn (see photos). First Edition. SIGNED BY ALBERT EINSTEIN TO JOHN KEMENY: "Meinem lieben Kemeny/ A. Einstein 50". "In 1943, Kemeny entered Princeton University where he studied mathematics and philosophy, but he took a year off during his studies to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his boss was Richard Feynman. He also worked there with John von Neumann. Returning to Princeton, Kemeny graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1946 after completing a senior thesis, titled 'Equivalent logical systems', under the supervision of Alonzo Church. He then remained at Princeton to pursue graduate studies and received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled 'Type-theory vs. set-theory', also under the supervision of Alonzo Church. He worked as Albert Einstein's mathematical assistant during graduate school" (Wikipedia article on John Kemeny). "At age 22, a year before he earned his Ph.D., Kemeny became Albert Einstein's mathematical assistant. I once asked him why Dr. Einstein, of all people, needed a mathematician. With that gentle, mustached smile, John said, 'Einstein wasn't very good at math' (Campion, "True Basic. A Sketch of John Kemeny for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine"; a .pdf of this article can be found online). "People would ask did you know enough physics to help Einstein? My standard line was: Einstein did not need help in physics. But contrary to popular belief, Einstein did need help in mathematics. By which I do not mean that he wasn't good at mathematics. He was very good at it, but he was not an up-to-date research level mathematician. His assistants were mathematicians for two reasons. First of all, in just ordinary calculations, anybody makes mistakes. There were many long calculations, deriving one formula from another to solve a differential equation. They go on forever. Any number of times we got the wrong answer. Sometimes one of us got the wrong answer, sometimes the other. The calculations were long enough that if you got the same answer at the end, you were confident. So he needed an assistant for that, and, frankly, I was more up-to-date in mathematics than he was" (ask me for the source of this quote and I will tell you). A biography of John Kemeny was published in 2019: John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency by Stephen Nelson. The book incorporates material from Kemeny's unpublished autobiography and includes a couple pages on how Kemeny became Einstein's mathematical assistant and their interaction when he was. NOTE: I am offering the trade edition of Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. There was also a limited and signed edition published in 1949 of 760 copies. Given the celebrity of Einstein, copies of the limited and signed edition always seem to be available (as I write this, six such copies are for sale online). They are nicely done, with the top edge gilt, and with a slipcase, so they are more sumptuous than the trade edition, and with the limited and signed edition of this book, you know you have a genuine Einstein signature. BUT: There is nothing personal about these copies (in rare instances Einstein did add a personal inscription to a limited and signed copy). So aside from differences in condition, these 760 copies are identical (unless you think a copy with a lower number is better than one with a higher number). The copy of the trade edition I am offering is in a very different category, because it was inscribed, and given personally, by Einstein to the recipient. And the recipient was someone who mattered to him. John Kemeny was a graduate student at Princeton when he became Einstein's mathematical assistant. This copy was Einstein's gift to "my dear Kemeny". The fact that John Kemeny went on to fame.
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