6.046J is the header course for the department's "Theoretical Computer Science" concentration. This course has virtually all of its course materials online, including complete sets of lecture notes and problem sets. The course textbook, Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition, is co-written by Professor Charles Leiserson (see http://mitpress.mit.edu/algorithms/ for more information).

6.046J is taught concurrently at MIT in the United States and as part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) program in Singapore. All aspects of the course- lectures, recitations, problem sets, and exams- are essentially the same in the two countries.

This course teaches techniques for the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, emphasizing methods useful in practice. Topics covered include: sorting; search trees, heaps, and hashing; divide-and-conquer; dynamic programming; amortized analysis; graph algorithms; shortest paths; network flow; computational geometry; number-theoretic algorithms; polynomial and matrix calculations; caching; and parallel computing.