Aubrey Kempner received in 1911 his PhD with the dissertation Über das Waringsche Problem und einige Verallgemeinerungen under Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen.
From 1950 he also taught at the Colorado School of Medicine and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder.
Kempner's research was mainly in number theory and the theory of calculating the center of mass of a region defined by polynomial equations.
In his honor the mathematics faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder established the Kempner Colloquium.
In the years 1937 and 1938 he was president of the Mathematical Association of America.