This text offers a comprehensive and accessible treatment of the theory of algorithms and complexity - the elegant body of concepts and methods developed by computer scientists over the past 30 years for studying the performance and limitations of computer algorithms. Among topics covered are: reductions and NP-completeness, cryptography and protocols, randomized algorithms, and approximability of optimization problems, circuit complexity, the "structural" aspects of the P=NP question, parallel computation, the polynomial hierarchy, and many others. Several sophisticated and recent results are presented in a rather simple way, while many more are developed in the form of extensive notes, problems, and hints. The book is surprisingly self-contained, in that it develops all necessary mathematical prerequisites from such diverse fields as computability, logic, number theory, combinatorics and probability.
Christos Papadimitriou was born and raised in Athens, Greece, and studied in Athens and at Princeton. He has taught Computer Science at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and, since 1996, at Berkeley, where he is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science. In his research he uses mathematics to understand the power and limitations of computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. He has written several of the standard textbooks in algorithms and computation, and two novels: "Turing" and "Logicomix" (with Apostolos Doxiadis, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna). He is working on his third novel, "Independence."
