ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the rates of growth of different functions and to introduce the five symbols of asymptotics that are used to describe those rates of growth. In the context of algorithms, the reason for this discussion is that we need a good language for the purpose of comparing the speeds with which different algorithms do the same job, or the amounts of memory that they use, or whatever other measure of the complexity of the algorithm we happen to be using. The chapter looks at the growth of sums that involve elementary functions, with a view toward discovering the rates at which the sums grow, and shows how to overestimate and understimate a sum.
