Paul Tarau, 73, who served as a professor of computer science and engineering and taught at UNT for 28 years, died March 10, 2026.

Born in Romania, he earned a mathematics degree at the Universitatea Din Bucuresti. He immigrated to Austria in 1981 to escape the existing political regime, then moved to Canada the following year, where he attended the Universite Laval and earned a master’s degree in computer science. Paul earned his Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of Montreal.

He taught full-time at the University of Moncton in New Brunswick until 1998, when he joined UNT. Paul went on to serve as a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research interests included natural language processing, artificial intelligence, logic programming, computational mathematics, agent infrastructures, compilers and run time systems. He had almost 200 refereed journal, international conference and workshop publications, and co-invented a patented graph-based ranking algorithm for text processing.

Paul was an avid traveler, a developer of open-source software, a writer of poetry and a master chess player. He spoke five languages and was on the Stanford University/Elsevier list of the World's Top 2% Scientists for citation impact over his career. Even while undergoing medical treatments over the years, he was a dedicated researcher and mentored junior faculty, advised graduate students and supervised TAMS students in their research. He gave his final scientific seminar from his hospital bed.