Introduction to Algorithms

The first edition of the algorithms textbook that became the standard one, and the reason it belongs in a cryptology library: its third author, Ronald L. Rivest, is the R of RSA, and the book gives a full chapter to the number theory that public-key cryptography runs on.

The MIT Press and McGraw-Hill co-published the book in 1990, at 1,028 pages. It sets out sorting, data structures, graph algorithms, dynamic programming and amortized analysis in pseudocode rather than in a programming language. The closing part collects selected topics: string matching, computational geometry, NP-completeness. Its chapter on number-theoretic algorithms runs from modular arithmetic and Euclid's algorithm through primality testing and integer factorization to the RSA cryptosystem. This copy is the fifteenth printing, from 1995. Clifford Stein joined as fourth author for the second edition in 2001, so the book is CLR here rather than the CLRS of later printings.

Thomas H. Cormen teaches at Dartmouth, Charles E. Leiserson and Ronald L. Rivest at MIT. Leiserson's own work runs to parallel computing and the Cilk language. Rivest devised RSA with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman in 1977, later designed the MD5 hash and the RC series of ciphers, and co-founded RSA Data Security.