Asymptotic notations
Asymptotic notation is a mathematical framework used to describe the behavior of algorithms in terms of their time and space complexities as the input size approaches infinity. It classifies algorithms according to their growth rates, allowing for the comparison of efficiency across different algorithms independently of hardware or implementation details. Adapted from the field of mathematical analysis, asymptotic notation describes the limiting behavior of mathematical functions. As its name suggests, asymptotic notation does not provide specific solutions but rather a formal representation of the behavior of functions as they scale.
Let’s assume we have a function like the following:
We want to predict the behavior of as . Although the term has a very large coefficient and there is a large constant , all terms except become insignificant whengrows very large. In mathematical analysis, we symbolically write and read it as “ is asymptotically...