I've been reading "Introduction to algorithms, third edition" (on Lorenzo's recommendation), its a massive book but I'm making my way through it. A bit pricey but definitely worth it, and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in algorithms. While going through the first few chapters I realised I was lacking on some of the mathematics required, thankfully the appendix covers the math you need. I've decided to do a series of posts on the stuff in the appendix to help me remember it all and hopefully help others as well. I'll try to be as accurate as possible but I'm learning this as I go along so it wouldn't be a bad idea to double check that I am in fact doing things right.<!-- more -->

If you're wondering why the sudden interest in algorithms. Our little summer project has been coming along pretty nicely.

See Fillta.com. It's pretty demanding on algorithms, mainly statistics related stuff. Some of the things we're doing can be found in http://nltk.org/'s lib but some of them require a little more control than you get with NLTK (not to mention I've only just started doing any serious Python/Jython and never used NLTK before now).

Anyway, we're hoping to have an Alpha ready for people to play with soon.