“Introduction to Algorithms” is the standard university textbook on the design and analysis of algorithms. Its first edition was published in 1990 by the MIT Press, written by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, and Ronald L. Rivest. A fourth author, Clifford Stein, joined for the second edition, which gave the book its enduring nickname: CLRS, after the initials of its four authors. A copy of the book is preserved in the Internet Archive’s scanned collection, where the title, MIT Press imprint, and authorship are recorded.
The book is encyclopedic in scope, covering algorithm analysis, sorting, data structures, graph algorithms, dynamic programming, greedy methods, and more advanced topics, while remaining rigorous enough to serve as a reference for working professionals. It became the most widely assigned algorithms text in computer science programs worldwide, and successive editions have expanded its coverage as the field has grown.
A distinctive feature of CLRS is its careful, language-independent pseudocode. The authors maintain a freely available MIT Press document, “Using the clrscode4e Package,” written by Cormen, that describes how the book’s pseudocode is typeset and formatted, reflecting the deliberate care the authors put into presenting algorithms to human readers rather than to a compiler.
Alongside Donald Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming,” CLRS anchors the modern teaching canon for algorithms. Where Knuth’s work is exhaustive and mathematically deep, CLRS is structured as a course text, pairing precise analysis with the clear, readable pseudocode that has shaped how a generation learned to describe algorithms.