Top Ten Algorithms "Great algorithms are the poetry of computation," says Francis Sullivan of the Institute for Defense Analyses' Center for Computing Sciences in Bowie, Maryland. He and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have put together a sampling that might have made Robert Frost beam with pride--had the poet been a computer jock. Their list of 10 algorithms having "the greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century" appears in the January/February issue of Computing in Science & Engineering. If you use a computer, some of these algorithms are no doubt crunching your data as you read this.