It’s a rare textbook that has sold over a million copies, has a Twitter account, has been a clue on Jeopardy!, and even made a cameo appearance in a popular Chinese soap opera.
That distinction belongs to the best-selling Introduction to Algorithms, co-authored by Dartmouth’s Thomas Cormen, professor emeritus of computer science.
That’s the beginning of this article from Dartmouth News, which includes this nugget:
There are three new chapters: one on a concept in graph theory called bipartite matching, another on online algorithms, where not all the data is available when the problem-solving proces begins. The third new chapter is on algorithms for machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence. According to Cormen, this chapter “is the one people are going to be pretty excited about.”
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The only words that scare me away from an article more than “algorithm” are “quantum” and “heuristics.” Sorry, David. I’ll look forward to your column next week instead.
I liked this, “I think of Tom’s famous Algorithms book as the Encyclopedia Galactica of problem-solving in computer science,” says Devin Balkcom, chair and professor of computer science. ”
As a fan of Douglas Adams and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I can appreciate that this is high praise indeed!”