Big O notation MIT Massachusetts Institute of （大O符号麻省理工学院麻省理工学院的）.pdf

Big O notation (with a capital letter O, not a zero), also called Landaus symbol, is a symbolism used in complexity theory, computer science, and mathematics to describe the asymptotic behavior of functions. Basically, it tells you how fast a function grows or declines. Landau s sy mbol comes from the name of the German number theoretician Edmund Landau who invented the notation. The letter O is used because the rate of growth of a function is also called its order. For example, when analyzing some algorithm, one might find that the time (or the number of steps) it takes to complete a problem of size n is given by T(n) = 4 n2 - 2 n + 2. If we ignore constants (which makes sense because those depend on the particular hardware the program is run on) and slower growing terms, we could say T(n) grows at 2 2 the order of n and write:T(n) = O(n ). In mathematics, it is often important to get a handle on the error term of an approximation. For instance, people will write x 2 3 e = 1 + x + x / 2 + O(x ) for x - 0 to express the fact that the error is smaller in absolute value than some constant times x3 if x is close enough to 0. For the formal definition, supposef (x) and g(x) are two functions defined on some subset of the real numbers. We write f (x) = O(g(x)) (orf (x) = O(g(x)) for x - to be more precise) if and only if there exist constants N and C such that f| (x)| C |g(x)| for all xN . Intuitively, this means thatf does not grow faster than g . If a is some real number, we write f (x) = O(g(x)) for x - a if and only if there exist constants d 0 and C such that f| (x)| C |g(x)| for all x with |x-a| d. The first definition is the only one used in computer science (where typ