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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.
For example, since the run-time of insertion sort grows quadratically as its input size increases, insertion sort can be said to be of order O(n 2). Big O notation is a convenient way to express the worst-case scenario for a given algorithm, although it can also be used to express the average-case — for example, the worst-case scenario for ...
This is an example of an asymptotic expansion. It is not a convergent series ; for any particular value of n {\displaystyle n} there are only so many terms of the series that improve accuracy, after which accuracy worsens.
Big O notation is an asymptotic measure of function complexity, where () = (()) roughly means the time requirement for an algorithm is proportional to (), omitting lower-order terms that contribute less than () to the growth of the function as grows arbitrarily large.
For typical serial sorting algorithms, good behavior is O(n log n), with parallel sort in O(log 2 n), and bad behavior is O(n 2). Ideal behavior for a serial sort is O(n), but this is not possible in the average case. Optimal parallel sorting is O(log n). Swaps for "in-place" algorithms. Memory usage (and use of other computer resources).
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The space complexity of an algorithm or a data structure is the amount of memory space required to solve an instance of the computational problem as a function of characteristics of the input.
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