Friday, November 30, 2007

Bob Tarjan is 60

Friday May 9, 2008: Workshop in honor of Tarjan's 60th birthday at Princeton, NJ, organized by Adam Buchsbaum, Valerie King and Danny Sleator. In many ways, these events remind us of maturing of Computer Science itself, CS being not that much older than its pioneers like Bob Tarjan.

Researchers are going to remember and remind others of his many contributions, so I will say the following \epsilon, somewhat from the left field.

I remember his slim volume on Data Structures, a gem, that in many ways continues to be my inspiration, in particular, in succinct, clear technical writing. In basketball parlance, it is swish, nothing but the net, when it comes to getting to the beauty of the main ideas and doing just enough mathematics to prove the main elements. There are details of course, they can be worked out, let us not floor and ceiling all x's or keep the constants around, just hide them in the all-engulfing O and be elegant.

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