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Sina Maleki
6,135 PointsBig O Notation problem
Hi everyone who knows any thing about "Drop the less significant terms" subject in Big O Notation? I confused because I don't know why when our runtime is O(n + n^2) we just call O(n^2)?
1 Answer
Jon Kussmann
Courses Plus Student 7,254 PointsHi Sina,
When we use big O notation, we are concerned with "large" values of n. Let's use your examples of O(n + n^2) and O(n^2). If n is small (let's say 10) then the values are 110 and 100, respectively. There is a 10% difference between them, which you could argue is pretty significant.
Now let's say n is 1,000. The values would then be 1,001,000. This is a 0.1% difference.
As n gets larger, the smaller terms make less of a difference in terms of the overall value, which is why we can drop the smaller terms - they do not make a significant difference to the overall value.
I hope this helps.