Early Life and Education
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. 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, and his Ph.D. dissertation was An Efficient Planarity Algorithm. Tarjan selected computer science as his area of interest because he believed that CS was a way of doing mathematics that could have a practical impact.
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