Uploaded November 2012 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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First Journey: Spoils of the Egyptians

The origins of the binary exponentiation algorithm and its use in different contexts, e.g. cryptography, linear recurrences, shortest path problems. The concept of semigroup and the family of related algorithms it determines; the mathematics underlying the parallel map-reduce technique.

Journey 1 Slides are available here: stepanovpapers.com/Journeys/Journey1.pdf

Full Course Notes are available here:
stepanovpapers.com/Journeys/Journeys-0.3.pdf