Kai Tapani Salomaa (born 9 February 1960) is a Finnish Canadian theoretical computer scientist, known for his numerous contributions to the state complexity of finite automata.

[1][2][3][4][5] His highly cited 1994 joint paper with Yu and Zhuang[6] laid the foundations of the area.

He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals on various subjects in formal language theory.

Salomaa did his undergraduate studies at the University of Turku, where he has earned his Ph.D. degree in 1989; his dissertation was jointly supervised by Ronald V. Book and Magnus Steinby.

His father, Arto Salomaa, is also a distinguished computer scientist with numerous contributions to the fields of automata theory and formal languages.