Martin Kay (1935 – 8 August 2021) was a computer scientist, known especially for his work in computational linguistics. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961. In 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, one of the earliest centres for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961, he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, US, where he eventually became head of research in linguistics and machine translation. He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. In 1974, he moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Research Fellow. In 1985, while retaining his position at Xerox PARC, he joined the faculty of Stanford University half-time. He was most recently Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. Life He was born in Edgware (Middlesex, Great Britain) in 1935 and he studied linguistics and computational linguistics at Trinity College in Cambridge. His main interests were translation, both by people and machines, and computational linguistic algorithms, especially in the fields of morphology and syntax. Work Kay began his career at the Cambridge language Research Unit in Cambridge, England under Margaret Masterman. In 1961 David G. Hays hired him to work for the RAND Corporation; he subsequently worked for the University of California, Irvine and Xerox PARC. Kay is one of the pioneers of computational linguistics and machine translation. He was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally. With Ron Kaplan, he pioneered research and application development in finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. In his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation," Kay argued for MT systems that were tightly integrated in the human translation process. He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects. Kay was a former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and President of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics. He was a Research Fellow at Xerox PARC until 2002. He held an honorary doctorate of Gothenburg University. Kay received the lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role