Comments on: First Look at the Big O Notation

By: Shriphani

Shriphani — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:05:24 +0000

I think the Vazirani I am talking about is that guy’s brother. Umesh Virkumar Vazirani: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/

This Vazirani is like the founder of the field of quantum computing (I usually hate calling anyone a founder, but I guess he deserves credit for it courtesy his solid reputation.)

By: tim

tim — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:16:21 +0000

is that vazirani this vazirani? (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vazirani/). if so, that dude was my teacher!

but i dropped that class. Honors proofs?…no way.

By: Maarten van Emden

Maarten van Emden — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:12:18 +0000

Of course asymptotic analysis is important and interesting. But I feel the time honoured big-O and little-o notation is stupid. I’m a big fan of Knuth’s, but I’m disappointed that he toes the traditional line here.

Please look at it this way. If f is O(g) and g is O(f), then f and g are asymptotically equivalent. Forget now about big-O and think in terms of this equivalence class (in the standard mathematical sense). Define =, arithmetic operations operations on this class. This way you can do everything in a mathematically crystal clear way and you don’t have to do the black magic with the pitfalls that Knuth warns about.

I’m happy I came across your site, because of your interesting interests. Congratulations on your SAT, which I think is a good test. And congratulations on Purdue.

Instead of putting these little snippets on Twitter, why don’t you try for more substantial pieces. You write well enough for that. Although some blogs are excellent, for myself I’m more ambitious and I only publish essays (vanemden.wordpress.com).