Biography
Robert Endre Tarjan (born April 30, 1948) is an American computer scientist and mathematician . He is the discoverer of several graph theory algorithms, including his strongly connected components algorithm , and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps . Tarjan is currently [ when? ] the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University . He and John Hopcroft won the 1986 ACM Turing Award . He was born in Pomona, California . His father, George Tarjan (1912–1991), raised in Hungary, [ 1 ] was a child psychiatrist, specializing in mental retardation, and ran a state hospital. [ 2 ] Robert Tarjan's younger brother James became a chess grandmaster. [ 3 ] As a child, Robert 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. [ 4 ] 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 ] Fields: Computer science Education: California Institute of Technology BS Stanford University MS PhD Award Citation: Paris Kanellakis Award (1999) Turing Award (1986) Nevanlinna Prize (1982)
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
Browse More
Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)