Thus, a procedure's stated complexity says that the time taken will be proportional to some function of the amount of data used in the computation and the amount demanded. In complexity calculations, ...Thus, a procedure's stated complexity says that the time taken will be proportional to some function of the amount of data used in the computation and the amount demanded. In complexity calculations, we only worry about what happens as the data lengths increase, and take the dominant term—here the 4N 2 term—as reflecting how much work is involved in making the computation.
