Robert Tarjan - Definition and Overview

Robert Endre Tarjan (born April 30, 1948 in Pomona, California) is a renowned computer scientist. He is the discoverer of several important graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line least common ancestors algorithm.

Tarjan received a Turing Award in 1986. The citation for the award states that it was :

For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.

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 and Donald Knuth, both highly prominent computer scientists.

Tarjan is currently a professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and also works for Hewlett-Packard.

External links

• Robert Tarjan's home page at Princeton (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ret/)