Robert Tarjan

Tarjan is an American computer scientist who, with John Hopcroft, transformed the design and analysis of algorithms; he invented depth-first-search-based graph algorithms, splay trees and Fibonacci heaps, and the pair shared the 1986 Turing Award. He earned his PhD at Stanford in 1972 and has been a professor at Princeton since 1985. His father, the psychiatrist George Tarjan, was raised in an intellectual, liberal Hungarian Jewish family, so Tarjan is of documented Jewish descent on his father's side. His data structures remain foundational to modern computing.