11 of the Most Famous Algorithms in Computer Science and their Inventors

WARNING: This list of the most famous algorithms is no particular order.

1. Quick sort algorithm. Quick sort is a divide and conquer algorithm for sorting an array. It was invented by Tony Hoare in 1959
2. Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. Dijkstra’s algorithm is an algorithm for finding the shortest path between nodes in a graph. It was invented by Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1956.
3. A* search algorithm. An informed search algorithm for finding the shortest path between two points. Invented by Peter Hart, Nils Nilsson and Bertram Raphael in 1968 at Standford research institute.
4. RSA algorithm. RSA is a public key cryptography algorithm used in encryption of data to support secure data communication. Invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman in 1977. RSA comes from the names of its inventors Ron, Shamir and Adleman hence RSA
5. K-Means clustering algorithm. An algorithm for portioning a set of data points into a set of k clusters. Invented by Stuart Lloyd of Bell Labs in 1957.
6. PageRank algorithm. PageRank is the algorithm used to rank google search engine results. Invented by the the confounders of Google ,Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996.
7. Prim’s algorithm. Prim’s algorithm is a greedy algorithm used to find the minimum spanning tree(a subset of all edges that connects all vertices together) in a graph. It was republished by Robert C. Prim in 1957
8. Kruskal’s algorithm . A greedy algorithm that finds a minimum spanning tree for a weighted undirected graph, Invented by Joseph Kruskal in 1956
9. FFT(Fast Fourier transform). An efficient algorithm for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and its inverse. Invented by Cooley and Tukey in 1965
10. Binary search algorithm. The Binary search algorithm is an efficient search algorithm that finds the position of a target value within a sorted array. Due to lack of proper documentation the origins of binary search algorithm is not known but the binary search tree algorithm is attributed to to Conway Berners-Lee and David Wheeler who first used it in 1960
11. Bellman- ford algorithm. Bellman ford algorithm is an algorithm that finds the shortest path between a single source vertex and all other vertices in a weighted graph. Invented by Richard Bellman in 1958.

Conclusion

• It should be noted that some of the algorithms presented above accomplish a similar set of problems but what sets them apart is their efficiency in different scenarios.
• This list was researched in effort with google and chatgpt.