Welcome to the London Big-O Meetup! This is London's first meetup focusing on data structures and algorithms, regardless of programming language.

I started this meetup for a few reasons. There's a general lack of similar events for people interested in the theory or maths behind the tools we use every day—dictionaries, sets, lists and regular expressions are things we all take for granted, but when you reach a large enough scale, the differences between implementations begin to show. It's important to understand how these fundamental pieces perform, so you can understand how they affect the behaviour of larger applications.

There's also the biggest frontier in Computer Science—parallelism. Many CompSci courses these days aren't bringing students up to the cutting edge, and there are limited opportunities for programmers in full-time work to stay on top of it all. As the terms 'Big Data' and 'Data Scientist' become more common, programmers need to have a knowledge of the most current research in the field. This is relevant not only to both SQL and NoSQL, but also compilers, CDNs, the Web and version control systems.

This isn't a meetup for the faint of heart. In order for it to be successful, it must be as accessible as possible—but we will be talking raw math and code. Sound like fun? :)

This meetup can only work if we have speakers who can bring some new information to the group. So if you'd like to speak about your favourite data structure or algorithm, or if you just have a request for a talk, send an e-mail to the list at big-o-london-list@meetup.com