Heaps are ubiquitous in computer science. If you need the minimum, or maximum of a collection, few choices are better than a heap for getting them. Heap-forming algorithms are the foundation of many different algorithms and data structures. From heapso
For the first 15 years or so of computing if you wanted an in-place general purpose sorting algorithm you were stuck with O(n^2) sorting algorithms. Insertion sort, selection sort, and bubble sort were about as far as
Mergesort is a beautiful algorithm. I make no secret of it being my favorite sorting algorithm (everybody has one of those, right?) and so I like to spend time playing around with it, thinking of different ways of implementing the concept. In this post
In a previous article on quicksort, I called it a fast sorting algorithm with an achilles heal: for certain inputs quicksort slows waaaaaay down. This is quite unfortunate, because on most inputs quicksort is very fast.