Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940 ) is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design.
He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. Until mid-2005, he was a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, and an Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After 10 years at Xerox PARC, Kay became Atari's chief scientist for three years.
Kay is also a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer, and an amateur classical pipe organist.
In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd. Alan Kay said, "I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me."
Alan Kay is a United States Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Judge Kay received his bachelor's degree in 1957 from the George Washington University, and his Juris Doctorate in 1959 from the George Washington University National Law Center.
Judge Kay began his legal career as a law clerk for Judge Alexander Holtzoff and Judge William B. Jones, both of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. From 1959 to 1967, Judge Kay worked as a public defender for the Public Defender Service, and as a federal prosecutor for the United States Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia. From 1967 until his appointment, he worked in private practice as a named partner at the Washington law firm of Bregman, Abell & Kay. He became a United States Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in September 1991.
Alan Kay is a computer scientist known for his work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Alan Kay may also refer to: