How often do you get to host a Turing Award winner? This week (12 May) we – University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science – hosted Robert Tarjan, who also delivered the public lecture “My Life with Data Structures”!

Robert Tarjan is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and a preeminent figure in theoretical computer science. He is renowned for his pioneering work on graph algorithms and data structures, incl. union-find, Fibonacci heaps, splay trees & a linear-time algorithm for finding strongly connected components in a directed graph problems. Over his career, he has authored hundreds of influential papers that have shaped both theoretical and practical aspects of computer science. His work is widely cited, with around 100K citations. For his fundamental contributions, he was awarded the Turing Award — the highest distinction in the field of computer science, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” (as of 2025, only 79 people have ever received it)- in 1986, among many other honors.

In his lecture, he covered data structures, his unique career path, life and science in the era of LLMs, future of traditional data structures in quantum era, gave advice for PhD students and early-career researchers and many more. Missed the talk? Watch the recording below.

It was our honor to host Robert Tarjan — an outstanding computer scientist, speaker, and truly generous person!