We've partnered with Dartmouth college professors Tom Cormen and Devin Balkcom to teach introductory computer science algorithms, including searching, sorting, recursion, and graph theory. Learn with a combination of articles, visualizations, quizzes, and coding challenges.

In computer science, merge sort (also commonly spelled mergesort) is an efficient, general-purpose, comparison-based sorting algorithm.Most implementations produce a stable sort, which means that the order of equal elements is the same in the input and output.Merge sort is a divide and conquer algorithm that was invented by John von Neumann in 1945. Merge sort. Merge sort is the algorithm which follows divide and conquer approach. Consider an array A of n number of elements. The algorithm processes the elements in 3 steps. Merge Sort Algorithm. Merge Sort follows the rule of Divide and Conquer to sort a given set of numbers/elements, recursively, hence consuming less time.. In the last two tutorials, we learned about Selection Sort and Insertion Sort, both of which have a worst-case running time of O(n 2).As the size of input grows, insertion and selection sort can take a long time to run. Sorting and Algorithm Analysis Computer Science E-119 Harvard Extension School Fall 2012 David G. Sullivan, Ph.D. Sorting an Array of Integers • Ground rules: • sort the values in increasing order • sort "in place," using only a small amount of additional storage • Terminology: • position: one of the memory locations in the array - [Instructor] Now we will learn another sorting algorithmcalled merge sort.This algorithm is a recursive algorithmand works very well for large sets of data.The most important step in the merge sort algorithmis the merge step.In this step, we take two individually sorted arrays,all right, and merge these twosuch that the resulting array is also sorted.So if the two Merge sort is an efficient and recursive algorithm for sorting an array. To sort an array recursively, merg