He grew up in Northern Germany and attended the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, a harbor town at the Baltic sea. He received an M.S. in computer science from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Cay taught computer science at San Jose State University for almost thirty years and held visiting appointments at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Vietnam, and Macao.
He was a “serial entrepreneur” before that was a thing, including a stint as VP and CTO of a dot com startup that went from three people in a tiny office to a public company.
In his copious spare time he writes books and develops online courses for beginning and professional programmers.
