Through the twitter feed of Tim O’Reilly, I came across this great post on network flow algorithms. Not only did I have fun revisiting the Min Cut / Max Flow, but there was a great link to an article listing the “10 algorithms with the greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century”. I am very excited, as for a few of them, I have absolutely no idea what they are about; it has always fascinated me to see the isolation of research fields, and how much they don’t know about each other.

Here is the official list:

Metropolis Algorithm for Monte Carlo

Simplex Method for Linear Programming

Krylov Subspace Iteration Methods

The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computations

The Fortran Optimizing Compiler

QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues

Quicksort Algorithm for Sorting

Fast Fourier Transform

Integer Relation Detection

Fast Multipole Method

Which ones do you know? And how did you come across them?