Algorithms are everywhere and some have been around for thousands of years. These 15 are some of the most influential or important ones used in science, math, physics, and computing.

Summary

1. Babylonian Algorithms Are the Oldest Ever Found
2. Euclid's Algorithm is Still in Use Today
3. The 'Sieve of Eratosthenes' is an Ancient, Simple Algorithm
4. Boolean (Binary) Algebra Was The Foundation For The Information Age
5. Ada Lovelace's Algorithm Was the First Computer Program
6. Fast Fourier Transform Breaks Down Signals Into Frequencies
7. Google's Ranking Algorithm (PageRank) Could Be the Most Widely Used Algorithm
8. Monte Carlo Method (Metropolis Algorithm) Was Used at Los Alamos
9. The Simplex Method for Linear Programming was Widely Adopted by Industry
10. Krylov Subspace Iteration Methods Are Still Used Today - the deceptively simple task of solving equations of the form Ax = b.
11. Kalman Filter is Great For Predicting the Future, sort of
12. QR Algorithms For Computing Eigenvalues Have Proved Incredibly Useful
13. The Fortran Optimizing Compiler Could Be The Most Important Event in Programming History
14. Quicksort Is Great at Helping Sort Things
15. JPEG and Other Data Compression Algorithms Are Incredibly Useful