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Big O notation is a mathematical notation that describes the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity. Big O is a member of a family of notations invented by German mathematicians Paul Bachmann, [1] Edmund Landau, [2] and others, collectively called Bachmann–Landau notation or asymptotic notation.
Asymptotic theory does not provide a method of evaluating the finite-sample distributions of sample statistics, however. Non-asymptotic bounds are provided by methods of approximation theory. Examples of applications are the following. In applied mathematics, asymptotic analysis is used to build numerical methods to approximate equation solutions.
In theoretical analysis of algorithms it is common to estimate their complexity in the asymptotic sense, i.e., to estimate the complexity function for arbitrarily large input. Big O notation, Big-omega notation and Big-theta notation are used to this end. [2]
The approach was first presented by Jon Bentley, Dorothea Blostein (née Haken), and James B. Saxe in 1980, where it was described as a "unifying method" for solving such recurrences. [1] The name "master theorem" was popularized by the widely used algorithms textbook Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.
Formally, suppose that we have a lower-bound theorem showing that a problem requires Ω(f(n)) time to solve for an instance (input) of size n (see Big O notation § Big Omega notation for the definition of Ω). Then, an algorithm which solves the problem in O(f(n)) time is said to be asymptotically optimal.
With respect to computational resources, asymptotic time complexity and asymptotic space complexity are commonly estimated. Other asymptotically estimated behavior include circuit complexity and various measures of parallel computation , such as the number of (parallel) processors.
In the theoretical analysis of algorithms, the normal practice is to estimate their complexity in the asymptotic sense. The most commonly used notation to describe resource consumption or "complexity" is Donald Knuth's Big O notation, representing the complexity of an algorithm as a function of the size of the input .
In some especially technical contexts, discretization methods' asymptotic rates and orders of convergence will be characterized by several scale parameters at once with the value of each scale parameter possibly affecting the asymptotic rate and order of convergence of the method with respect to the other scale parameters.