By the Office of Engineering Communications
Robert Tarjan has received the 2025 Basic Science Lifetime Award from the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS).
Tarjan is one of six scientists and engineers to be recognized by the ICBS for “outstanding and innovative” contributions to computer science, mathematics and physics. The award was announced at Tsinghua University on March 21.
The award recognizes Tarjan’s contributions to theoretical computer science, particularly his groundbreaking work on graph theory algorithms and data structures. According to a press release from the ICBS, Tarjan’s “work on graph algorithms, particularly his development of depth-first search and strongly connected components, revolutionized the field of computational graph theory.”
Over the course of his career, Tarjan has also introduced several data structures, including the Fibonacci heap and the splay tree. “These innovations have had a profound impact on algorithm design, enabling faster and more efficient solutions to a wide range of computational problems,” according to the press release.
Tarjan joined the Princeton faculty in 1985 and has won many awards for his work. In 1986, he received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the highest distinction in the field of computer science. In 1982, he was the first winner of the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize (now called the Abacus Prize) from the International Mathematical Union. He is also the recipient of the Blaise Pascal Medal and the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, among others.
Tarjan received doctoral and master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford, after earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Caltech. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.