José Moyal completed his tertiary studies at Cambridge and in France, and worked for the Ministère de l'Air during the early years of World War II. He escaped to England through Bordeaux when the Germans entered Paris. Until he came to Australia in 1954, Moyal worked at the de Havilland aircraft factory and held academic positions at Queen's University, Belfast, the University of Manchester, and in the United States. In 1958 Moyal was appointed Reader in the Department of Statistics at A.N.U. and in 1972 he became Professor of Mathematics at Macquarie University. His early research was in the properties of rubber and rubber-like materials, and in mathematical physics including quantum theory. He was the originator of the 'Moyal bracket' in quantum mechanics. Moyal's main research was the theory of stochastic processes and its application to physical problems such as neutron diffusion and multiplication, and cascades. He published several influential papers concerned with discontinuous Markov processes and theories of population processes.