This course teaches techniques for the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, emphasizing methods useful in practice. Topics covered include: sorting; search trees, heaps, and hashing; divide-and-conquer; dynamic programming; amortized analysis; graph algorithms; shortest paths; network flow; computational geometry; number-theoretic algorithms; polynomial and matrix calculations; caching; and parallel computing.

This course was also taught as part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) programme as course number SMA 5503 (Analysis and Design of Algorithms).