John Hopcroft

Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist. He is the discoverer of several graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line least common... ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and is also a Senior Fellow at Hewlett-Packard. He was born in Pomona, California. His father was a child psychiatrist specializing in mental retardation, and ran a state hospital. 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. While he was in high school, Tarjan got a job, where he worked IBM card punch collators. He first worked with real computers while studying astronomy at the Summer Science Program in 1964. Tarjan obtained a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1969.
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