Creating "Algorithms"

Abstract

This talk describes an ongoing 25-year effort to develop a series of books that describe fundamental algorithms to a broad audience. The books' content provides a special opportunity to use technology to more effectively present the material, so the talk focuses on various approaches along these lines to take advantage of this opportunity. Particular attention is given to the process of integrating into a single document representations of algorithms (as programs in several languages), text describing them, and high- resolution images representing their underlying data structures. The perspective taken is historical, anecdotal, and technical, with an eye towards what the experience can tell us about future tools.