Clifford Stein
- See also Wikipedia's article about "Clifford Stein".
- See also Clifford Stein's entry in Columbia's directory.
Clifford Stein is a professor in both the IEOR and CS departments. He is best known as co-author of the book Introduction to Algorithms, the de facto standard book on programming algorithms. He teaches the course Introduction to Algorithms I based on the text.
Classroom quotes
- "I suppose if an adversary was trying to make your life difficult, he could think of a better way than to degrade the efficiency of your skip lists..." explaining why he didn't build in defensive measures into his example skip list algorithm.
- "Most people don't have a very good understanding of statistics. They think that it's a special thing when they have a dream and it comes true, but if you think about it, you have - what? 3 to 5 dreams per night, 365 nights a year and your dreams are generally somewhat based on what happens in your everyday life, so there's a pretty good chance that some of them will come true from time to time. What would be more interesting is if your dreams never came true. You're actually pretty special if you can say your dreams never come true."
