Guest Lecture by Robert Tarjan

Latvijas Universitātes Faculty of Exact Sciences and Technology invites students, researchers, and all interested participants to a guest lecture taking place on 27 April at 15:00 in the Great Hall of the University of Latvia.

The lecture will be delivered by one of the most influential contemporary computer scientists, Turing Award laureate Robert Tarjan.

Dijkstra’s algorithm is one of the most fundamental algorithms in both theory and practice, widely used in route planning and network optimization. Starting from a chosen source point, it efficiently determines the shortest paths to all reachable vertices using a so‑called “greedy” approach and orders the results by increasing distance. This raises an essential question — is the algorithm optimal?

In the lecture, Professor Tarjan will present the latest research that provides answers to this question. Based on joint work with Bernhard Haeupler, Richard Hladík, Václav Rozhoň, and Jakub Tětek, the talk will examine cases where the answer is affirmative, as well as results that reveal the algorithm’s limitations. The lecture will offer both deep theoretical insight and a broader perspective on the notion of optimality in algorithm design.

Robert Tarjan is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Over the course of his career, he has held leading academic positions at Cornell, Berkeley, Stanford, and New York University, and has worked in major industrial research centers, including Bell Labs, NEC, HP, and Microsoft. His contributions to the development of data structures and graph algorithms have had a profound impact on the field of computer science.

For his outstanding achievements, he has received several major awards, including the Nevanlinna Prize and the Turing Award (together with John Hopcroft) for fundamental contributions to the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. He is a member of several prestigious academies, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This lecture offers a unique opportunity to learn about cutting‑edge research and hear from a world‑class scientist whose work continues to shape the foundations of computer science.

To register for the lecture, please fill in the registration form by 26 April