5.1 A First Recurrence: The Mergesort Algorithm

Divide and conquer algorithms are a class of algorithmic techniques in which one breaks the input into several parts, solves the problem in each part recursively,and then combines the solutions to these subproblems into an overall solution. Analyzing these problems usually involves solving recurrence relation that bounds the running time recursively in terms of the running time on smaller instances. Mergesort uses the same template as other divide and conquer algorithms to sort a given list of items.