Algorithms

About The Course

In this course you will learn several fundamental principles of algorithm design. You’ll learn the divide-and-conquer design paradigm, with applications to fast sorting, searching, and multiplication. You’ll learn several blazingly fast primitives for computing on graphs, such as how to compute connectivity information and shortest paths. Finally, we’ll study how allowing the computer to “flip coins” can lead to elegant and practical algorithms and data structures. Learn the answers to questions such as: How do data structures like heaps, hash tables, bloom filters, and balanced search trees actually work, anyway? How come QuickSort runs so fast? What can graph algorithms tell us about the structure of the Web and social networks? Did my 3rd-grade teacher explain only a suboptimal algorithm for multiplying two numbers?

Prerequisites

How to program in at least one programming language (like C, Java, or Python); familiarity with proofs, including proofs by induction and by contradiction; and some discrete probability, like how to compute the probability that a poker hand is a full house. At Stanford, a version of this course is taken by sophomore, junior, and senior-level computer science majors.

Textbooks

No books are required for the course. However, three books have significantly influenced the instructor’s presentation and can be consulted for extra details. In order of decreasing relevance to the course, they are: Kleinberg & TardosAlgorithm Design, Dasgupta, Papadimitriou & VaziraniAlgorithms, and Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, & SteinIntroduction to Algorithms.

No special software (e.g., development enviroment) is required to take this course.

The Instructor

Tim Roughgarden is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Management Science and Enginering at Stanford University, where he holds the Chambers Faculty Scholar development chair. At Stanford, he has taught the Design and Analysis of Algorithms course for the past eight years. His research concerns the theory and applications of algorithms, especially for networks, auctions and other game-theoretic applications, and data privacy. For his research, he has been awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Shapley Lecturership of the Game Theory Society, a Sloan Fellowship, INFORM’s Optimization Prize for Young Researchers, and the Mathematical Programming Society’s Tucker Prize.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does the class start?The class will start in January 2012.
What is the format of the class?The class will consist of lecture videos, which are broken into small chunks, usually between eight and twelve minutes each. Some of these may contain integrated quiz questions. There will also be standalone quizzes that are not part of video lectures, and programming assignments. There will be approximately two hours worth of video content per week.
Will the text of the lectures be available?We hope to transcribe the lectures into text to make them more accessible for those not fluent in English. Stay tuned.
Do I need to watch the lectures live?No. You can watch the lectures at your leisure.
Can online students ask questions and/or contact the professor?Yes, but not directly There is a Q&A forum in which students rank questions and answers, so that the most important questions and the best answers bubble to the top. Teaching staff will monitor these forums, so that important questions not answered by other students can be addressed.
Will other Stanford resources be available to online students?No.