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Algorithms that are the main driver behind a system are, in my opinion, easier to find in non-algorithms courses for the same reason theorems with immediate applications are easier to find in applied mathematics rather than pure mathematics courses. It is rare for a practical problem to have the exact structure of the abstract problem in a lecture. To be ...

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$\lambda$-calculus has two key roles. It is a simple mathematical foundation of sequential, functional, higher-order computational behaviour. It is a representation of proofs in constructive logic. This is also known as the Curry-Howard correspondence. Jointly, the dual view of $\lambda$-calculus as proof and as (sequential, functional, higher-order) ...

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If you really want to know what led Neil Robertson and me to tree-width, it wasn't algorithms at all. We were trying to solve Wagner's conjecture that in any infinite set of graphs, one of them is a minor of another, and we were right at the beginning. We knew it was true if we restricted to graphs with no k-vertex path; let me explain why. We knew all such ...

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To complete the other answers: I think that Turing Machine are a better abstraction of what computers do than finite automata. Indeed, the main difference between the two models is that with finite automata, we expect to treat data that is bigger than the state space, and Turing Machine are a model for the other way around (state space >> data) by making the ...

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PageRank is one of the best-known such algorithms. Developed by Google co-founder Larry Page and co-authors, it formed the basis of Google's original search engine and is widely credited with helping them to achieve better search results than their competitors at the time. We imagine a "random surfer" starting at some webpage, and repeatedly clicking a ...

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I would mention the widely-used software CPLEX (or similar) implementation of the Simplex method/algorithm for solving linear programming problems. It is the (?) most used algorithm in economy and operations research. "If one would take statistics about which mathematical problem is using up most of the computer time in the world, then (not counting ...

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A flip answer is that this isn't the first thing about complexity theory that I'd try to explain to a layperson! To even appreciate the idea of nonuniformity, and how it differs from nondeterminism, you need to be further down in the weeds with the definitions of complexity classes than many people are willing to get. Having said that, one perspective that ...

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There are two approaches when considering this question: historical that pertains to how concepts were discovered and technical which explains why certain concepts were adopted and others abandoned or even forgotten. Historically, the Turing Machine is perhaps the most intuitive model of several developed trying to answer the Entscheidungsproblem. This is ...

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As I understand it, the National Resident Matching Program was for a long time just a straight application of the Gale-Shapley algorithm for the stable marriage problem. It has since been slightly updated to handle some extra details like spousal assignments (aka the "two-body problem"), etc...

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There's an algorithm for multiplying an $N \times N^{0.172}$ matrix with an $N^{0.172} \times N$ matrix in $N^2 \operatorname{polylog}\left(N\right)$ arithmetic operations. The main identity used for it comes from Coppersmith's paper "Rapid multiplication of rectangular matrices", but the explanation for why it leads to $N^2 \operatorname{polylog}\left(N\... 29 I think$\lambda$-calculus has contributed in many ways to this field, and still contributes to it. Three examples follow, and this is not exhaustive. Since I am not a specialist in$\lambda$-calculus, I certainly miss some important points. First, I think having different models of computation that turn out to represent the exact same set of functions was ... 28 Here is a "smoothness" argument that I heard recently in defense of the claim that non-uniform models of computation should be more powerful than we suspect. On one hand, we know from the time hierarchy theorem that there are functions computable in time$O(2^{2n})$that are not computable in time$O(2^{n})$, for example. On the other hand, by Lupanov's ... 28 Grothendieck's inequality, from his days in functional analysis, was initially proved to relate fundamental norms on tensor product spaces. Grothendieck called the inequality "the fundamental theorem of the metric theory of tensor product spaces", and published it in a now famous paper in 1958, in French, in a limited circulation Brazilian journal. The paper ... 27 I am assuming that you are referring to CDCL SAT solvers on benchmark data sets like those used in the SAT Competition. These programs are based on many heuristics and lots of optimization. There were some very good introductions to how they work at Theoretical Foundations of Applied SAT Solving workshop at Banff in 2014 (videos). These algorithms are based ... 26 He wanted to create a formal system for the foundations of logic and mathematics that was simpler than Russell's type theory and Zermelo's set theory. The basic idea was to add a constant$\Xi$to the untyped lambda calculus (or combinatory logic) and interpret$XZ$as expressing "$Z$satisfies the predicate$X$" and$\Xi XY$as expressing "$X\subseteq Y$". ... 24 Very briefly: the simply-typed$\lambda$-calculus does not have dependent types. Dependent types were proposed by de Bruijn and Howard who wanted to extend the Curry-Howard correspondence from propositional to first-order logic. The key contribution of Martin-Löf's is a novel analysis of equality. There are two main ways of giving Curry-Howard style ... 23 If you're also including PhD-level stuff, many (most?) graduate CS programs include some course in coding theory. If you have a course in coding theory, you will definitely cover the Reed-Solomon code which is integral to how compact discs work and Huffman encoding which is used in JPEG, MP3, and ZIP file formats. Depending on the orientation of the course, ... 22 GNU grep is a command line tool for searching one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. It is well-known that grep is very fast! Here's a quote from its author Mike Haertel (taken from here): GNU grep uses the well-known Boyer-Moore algorithm, which looks first for the final letter of the target string, and uses a lookup ... 22 Apart from the foundational role of the$\lambda$-calculus, which was mentioned in all other answers, I would like to add something on What exactly did the lambda calculus do to advance the theory of CS? I believe that concurrency theory is one field of CS which has been tremendously influenced by the compositional view mentioned by Martin Berger. Of ... 22 I am typing this quite quickly due to severe time constraints (and didn't even get to responding earlier for the same reason), but I thought I would try to at least chip in with my two cents. I think this is a truly great question, and have spent a nontrivial amount of time over the last few years looking into this. (Full disclosure: I have received a big ... 20 Your question itself is not naive but the type of answer you ask for is. It is rare for any line of work or intellectual enquiry to have an elevator pitch explanation. Not all would agree with your characterizations of mathematics and physics because they ignore the depth and nuances of those fields. Theoretical computer scientists are concerned with ... 19 Some graph classes allow polynomial-time algorithms for problems that are NP-hard for the class of all graphs. For instance, for perfect graphs, one can find a largest independent set in polynomial time (thanks to vzn in a comment for jogging my memory). Via a product construction, this also allows a unified explanation for several apparently quite ... 19 Lattice-basis reduction (LLL algorithm). This the basis for efficient integer polynomial factorization and some efficient cryptanalytic algorithms like breaking of linear-congruential generators and low-degree RSA. In some sense you can view the Euclidean algorithm as a special case. 19 More generally, the Kanellakis prize is awarded by the ACM for precisely such theoretical discoveries that have had a major impact in practice. the 2012 award is for locality-sensitive hashing, which has become a go-to method for dimensionality reduction in data mining for near neighbor problems (and is relatively easy to teach - at least the algorithm ... 18 The CountMin Sketch and Count Sketch, from data streaming algorithms, are used in industrial systems for network traffic analysis and analysis of very large unstructured data. These are data structure that summarize the frequency of a huge number of items in a tiny amount of space. Of course they do that approximately, and the guarantee is that, with high ... 18 Grothendieck's impact can be felt in type theory and logic. For instance, Bart Jacobs' 700+ page volume Categorical Logic and Type Theory gives a uniform treatment of various type theories ($X$-type theory, where$X\subseteq \{ \text{simple},\text{dependent},\text{polymorphic},\text{higher-order}\}\$) based on the categorical notion of Grothendieck ...

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I'm not an expert in this area, but I think the random SAT / phase transition stuff is more or less completely unrelated to the industrial/practical applications stuff. E.g., the very good solvers for random instances (such as https://www.gableske.net/dimetheus) are based on the statistical physics methods (belief propagation etc.) I believe, whereas the ...

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Let me add my two cents of understanding to this, even though I've never actually worked in the area. You're asking one of two questions, "what are all the known approaches to proving theoretical efficiency of some SAT solver for some type of instances" and "why are SAT solvers efficient in reality". For the former question, I'll just direct you to the ...

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In the last decade algorithms have been used to increase the number (and quality, I think?) of kidney transplants through various kidney donor matching programs. I've been having trouble finding the latest news on this, but here are at least a few pointers: As recently as 2007 the Alliance for Paired Donation was using an algorithm of Abraham, Blum, and ...

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Type theories in which every type is inhabited are far from being useless. True enough, through the eyes of logic they are inconsistent, but there are other things in life apart from logic. A general purpose programming language has general recursion. This allows it to populate every type, but we would not conclude from this fact that programming is a ...

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