Landau notation

Landau notation is the family of asymptotic notations — O, Ω, Θ, o, ω — introduced by Paul Bachmann and Edmund Landau to describe the limiting behavior of functions. The notations partition the space of growth rates into a hierarchy of containment and strictness that underpins all of computational complexity theory. Without this notational infrastructure, the classification of algorithms into complexity classes would be impossible to state with the precision that the field requires.