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Algorithm↕ | Category↕ | Inventor↕ | Year↕ | Why It Matters↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Binary Search | Searching | John Mauchly | 1946 | O(log n) search on sorted data, interview question #1, off-by-one errors haunt everyone |
QuickSort | Sorting | Tony Hoare | 1959 | Average O(n log n), in-place, most standard library default, pivot selection is an art |
Merge Sort | Sorting | John von Neumann | 1945 | Guaranteed O(n log n), stable, divide and conquer elegance, great for linked lists |
Dijkstra's Algorithm | Graph | Edsger Dijkstra | 1956 | Shortest path in weighted graphs, powers every GPS and routing system on Earth |
A* Search | Pathfinding | Hart, Nilsson, Raphael | 1968 | Heuristic-guided pathfinding, every video game uses it, optimal with admissible heuristic |
PageRank | Graph/Ranking | Larry Page & Sergey Brin | 1996 | Built Google, random walk on the web graph, eigenvector of the link matrix, changed the internet |
RSA Encryption | Cryptography | Rivest, Shamir, Adleman | 1977 | Public-key cryptography, secures the internet, based on prime factorization being hard |
Fast Fourier Transform | Signal Processing | Cooley & Tukey | 1965 | O(n log n) frequency analysis, powers audio/image processing, MP3s, WiFi, MRI scans |
MapReduce | Distributed | Jeffrey Dean & Sanjay Ghemawat (Google) | 2004 | Parallel processing paradigm, inspired Hadoop, process petabytes across thousands of machines |
Backpropagation | Machine Learning | Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams | 1986 | Trains neural networks, chain rule applied, enabled the deep learning revolution |
Huffman Coding | Compression | David Huffman | 1952 | Optimal prefix-free encoding, used in ZIP/GZIP/JPEG/MP3, variable-length codes |
Dynamic Programming | Optimization | Richard Bellman | 1950s | Break problems into overlapping subproblems, fibonacci to knapsack, interview gatekeeping tool |
Gradient Descent | Optimization | Augustin-Louis Cauchy | 1847 | Follow the slope downhill, trains every ML model, learning rate is everything, SGD variants endless |
Bloom Filter | Data Structures | Burton Howard Bloom | 1970 | Probabilistic set membership, false positives possible but never false negatives, used everywhere at scale |
Consistent Hashing | Distributed | David Karger et al. | 1997 | Distribute data across nodes, minimal reshuffling when nodes join/leave, powers DynamoDB and Cassandra |
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