←back to thread

A visual introduction to big O notation

(samwho.dev)
688 points samwho | 1 comments | 24 Aug 25 07:39 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
fracus ◴[25 Aug 25 20:02 UTC] No.45018314[source]▶
Having gone through electrical engineering, I always felt that Big O notation was never properly explained unless I happened to miss every time it was introduced. It always felt like it was just hand waived as something we should already know. I'm curious what level of math or computer science is usually responsible for introducing it.
replies(7): >>45018615 #>>45018641 #>>45019080 #>>45020045 #>>45021112 #>>45027527 #>>45029029 #
1. anthomtb ◴[26 Aug 25 16:43 UTC] No.45029029[source]▶
Big O was introduced in my Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) class which was nominally a second year undergrad class. In practice, most Computer Science (CS) students were far enough advanced to take DSA in their first year.

I took DSA as a third-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student. I recall maybe 15 minutes of exposition on the topic and exam questions of a near-throwaway nature (ergo: write this tree parsing algorithm, 95 points for your code's correctness, 5 points for explaining your algorithm's Big O complexity). It did seem like something that CS professors and teaching assistants considered either trivial or self-explanatory.