In masters theorem were given a "plug-in" formula to find the big O, given it satisfies some condition.
However, what if we have problems like the following below? Can anyone show me how to do a step by step formula. And what topics would help me to know more about these types of questions. Assume that the person asking this question knows nothing about induction.
T(n)=T(n^(1/2))+1
T(n)=T(n-1) + 1
T(n)=T(n-1) + n^c , c is a natural number >1
T(n)= T(n-1) C^n, c is a natural number >1
You'll need to know a little math to do some of these. You can figure out what the recursion looks like when you expand it out all the way to the base case, e.g. for T(n) = T(n-1) + n^c you get T(n) = 1^c + 2^c + ... + n^c, but then you need to know some math in order to know that this is O(n^(c+1)). (The easiest way to see this is by bounding the sum above and below in terms of integrals of x^c). Similarly for T(n) = T(n-1) + c^n you easily get T(n) = c^1 + c^2 + ... + c^n but you again need to use some calculus or something to figure out that this is T(n) = O(c^n).
For T(n) = T(n^(1/2)) + 1 you need to count how many times you apply the recurrence before you get to the base case. Again math helps here. When you take square-root, the logarithm gets cut in half. So you want to know how many times you can cut the logarithm in half until you get to the base case. This is O(log log n).