He was born in
Pomona, California. His father, raised in Hungary,[1] was a child psychiatrist, specializing in mental retardation, and ran a state hospital.[2] As a child, Tarjan read a lot of science fiction, and wanted to be an
astronomer. He became interested in
mathematics after reading
Martin Gardner's mathematical games column in
Scientific American. He became seriously interested in math in the eighth grade, thanks to a "very stimulating" teacher.[3]
While he was in high school, Tarjan got a job, where he worked with IBM punch card collators. He first worked with real computers while studying astronomy at the
Summer Science Program in 1964.[2]
Tarjan obtained a
Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the
California Institute of Technology in 1969. At
Stanford University, he received his master's degree in computer science in 1971 and a
Ph.D. in computer science (with a minor in mathematics) in 1972. At Stanford, he was supervised by
Robert Floyd[4] and
Donald Knuth,[5] both highly prominent computer scientists, and his Ph.D. dissertation was An Efficient Planarity Algorithm. Tarjan selected computer science as his area of interest because he believed that computer science was a way of doing mathematics that could have a practical impact.[6]
Tarjan now lives in Princeton, NJ, and Silicon Valley. He is married to Nayla Rizk.[7]
He has three daughters: Alice Tarjan, Sophie Zawacki, and Maxine Tarjan.[8]
Computer science career
Tarjan has been teaching at Princeton University since 1985.[6] He has also held academic positions at
Cornell University (1972–73),
University of California, Berkeley (1973–1975),
Stanford University (1974–1980), and
New York University (1981–1985). He has also been a fellow of the NEC Research Institute (1989–1997).[9] In April 2013 he joined Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in addition to the position at Princeton. In October 2014 he rejoined Intertrust Technologies as chief scientist.
Tarjan has worked at AT&T Bell Labs (1980–1989), Intertrust Technologies (1997–2001, 2014–present), Compaq (2002) and Hewlett Packard (2006–2013).
Tarjan has also developed important data structures such as the
Fibonacci heap (a heap data structure consisting of a forest of trees), and the
splay tree (a self-adjusting binary search tree; co-invented by Tarjan and
Daniel Sleator). Another significant contribution was the analysis of the
disjoint-set data structure; he was the first to prove the optimal runtime involving the inverse
Ackermann function.[11]
Awards
Tarjan received the
Turing Award jointly with
John Hopcroft in 1986. The citation for the award states[9] that it was:
For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.
Tarjan was also elected an
ACM Fellow in 1994. The citation for this award states:[12]
For seminal advances in the design and analysis of data structures and algorithms.
1987: Fibonacci heaps and their uses in improved network optimization algorithms, ML Fredman, RE Tarjan, Journal of the ACM (JACM) 34 (3), 596-615[21]
1983: Data structures and network algorithms, RE Tarjan, Society for industrial and Applied Mathematics[22]
1988: A new approach to the maximum-flow problem, V Goldberg, RE Tarjan, Journal of the ACM (JACM) 35 (4), 921-940[23]
Patents
Tarjan holds at least 18 U.S. patents.[5] These include:
J. Bentley, D. Sleator, and R. E. Tarjan, U. S. Patent 4,796,003, Data Compaction, 1989[24]
N. Mishra, R. Schreiber, and R. E. Tarjan, U. S. Patent 7,818,272, Method for discovery of clusters of objects in an arbitrary undirected graph using a difference between a fraction of internal connections and maximum fraction of connections by an outside object, 2010[25]
B. Pinkas, S. Haber, R. E. Tarjan, and T. Sander, U. S. Patent 8220036, Establishing a secure channel with a human user, 2012[26]
Tarjan, Robert E. (1983). Data structures and network algorithms. Philadelphia: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
ISBN978-0-89871-187-5.
OCLC10120539.