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Chapter 26
Algorithms and
Computational Complexity
As described in Chapter 5, the word algorithm comes from the name of
an Arabic mathematician, al-Khawarizmi, who wrote his famous book,
Rules of Restoration and Reduction, in the ninth century. According to the
book by Donald E. Knuth (1938–) [1], the original meaning of the word
algorithm is “the process of doing arithmetic using Arabic numerals.”
Knuth also mentioned in the same book that the word algorithm did not
appear in Webster’s New World Dictionary as late as 1957. Let us look up
the word in some old versions of English dictionaries. e Concise Oxford
Dictionary in 1964 denes t