Editing Robert Tarjan (section)

==Personal life and education==
He was born in [[Pomona, California]]. His father, George Tarjan (1912–1991), raised in Hungary,<ref>{{cite web|title=Jewish Recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award|website=jinfo.org|url=http://www.jinfo.org/Computer_ACM_Turing.html}}</ref> was a child psychiatrist, specializing in mental retardation, and ran a state hospital.<ref name="Out_of_Their_Minds">{{cite book
 | last = Shasha
 | first = Dennis Elliott
 | author2 = Lazere, Cathy A.
 | title = Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists
 | publisher = Copernicus/Springer
 | orig-year = 1995
 | year = 1998
 | isbn = 978-0-387-97992-2
 | oclc = 32240355
 | chapter = Robert E. Tarjan: In Search of Good Structure
 | pages = [https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780387979922/page/102 102–119]
 | url-access = registration
 | url = https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780387979922/page/102
 }}</ref> Robert Tarjan's [[James Tarjan|younger brother James]] became a chess grandmaster.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Melvin|first=Shabsin|title=George Tarjan, M.D. one hundred twelfth president, 1983-1984|journal=The American Journal of Psychiatry|volume=141|issue=8|pages=931–934|date=August 1984|doi=10.1176/ajp.141.8.931|pmid=6380318 }}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite web
 | url = http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2004/oct_dec/tarjan.html
 | title = Robert Tarjan: The Art of the Algorithm
 | publisher = Hewlett-Packard
 | access-date = 2010-09-05
}}</ref>

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.<ref name="Out_of_Their_Minds"/>

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 [[Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D.]] in computer science (with a minor in mathematics) in 1972. At Stanford, he was supervised by [[Robert W. Floyd|Robert Floyd]]<ref>{{cite web
 | url = http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=53460
 | title = Robert Endre Tarjan
 | publisher = Mathematics Genealogy Project
 | access-date = 2008-01-09
}}</ref> and [[Donald Knuth]],<ref name="CV"/> 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.<ref name="HP_art_of_algo">{{cite web
 | url = http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2004/oct_dec/tarjan.html
 | title = Robert Endre Tarjan: The art of the algorithm (interview)
 |date=September 2004
 | publisher = Hewlett-Packard
 | access-date = 2008-01-09
}}</ref>

Tarjan now lives in Princeton, NJ, and Silicon Valley. He is married to Nayla Rizk.<ref>{{cite web
 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/fashion/weddings/nayla-rizk-and-robert-tarjan.html
 | title = Nayla Rizk and Robert Tarjan
 | date = July 2013
 | work = The New York Times
}}</ref>
He has three daughters: Alice Tarjan, Sophie Zawacki, and Maxine Tarjan.<ref>{{cite web
 | url = http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/archive/Workshops/Tarjan/materials/event-photos.html
 | title = Photos from Bob Tarjan's 60th Birthday Symposium
 | date = May 2008
 | publisher = DIMACS
}}</ref>