He was born in
Pomona, California. His father, George Tarjan (1912–1991), raised in Hungary, was a child psychiatrist, specializing in intellectual disability, and ran a state hospital. Robert Tarjan's
younger brother James became a chess grandmaster. 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. 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. and
Donald Knuth, Tarjan now lives in Princeton, NJ, and Silicon Valley. He is married to Nayla Rizk. He has three daughters: Alice Tarjan, Sophie Zawacki, and Maxine Tarjan. ==Computer science career==