Alan Kay  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 (GUI) design. He was the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute before its closure in 2018, 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). 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., Kay said:  Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before ultimately settling in the New York metropolitan area when he was nine. He attended the prestigious Brooklyn Technical High School, where he was suspended due to insubordination in his senior year. Having already accumulated enough credits to graduate, Kay then attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia. He majored in biology and minored in mathematics before he was asked to leave by the administration for protesting the institution's Jewish quota. Thereafter, Kay taught guitar in Denver, Colorado for a year and hastily enlisted in the United States Air Force when the local draft board inquired about his nonstudent status. Assigned as a computer programmer (a rare billet dominated by women due to the secretarial connotations of the field in the era) after passing an aptitude test, he devised an early cross-platform file transfer system. Following his discharge, Kay enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966. Before and during this time, he worked as a professional jazz guitarist. During his studies at CU, he wrote the music for an adaptation of "The Hobbit" and other campus theatricals. In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering. He earned a Master of Science (M.S.) in electrical engineering in 1968 before taking his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in computer science in 1969. His doctoral dissertation, "FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language", described the invention of a computer language known as FLEX.