Years later, Leo became a professor himself. And in his first year of teaching, he received a frantic email from a student named Maya: “Professor Lin, I can’t find the Aho & Ullman PDF anywhere, and the midterm is in three days. Do you know where I can get it?”
The physical copy was a myth. The university library had two: one was eaten by a golden retriever in 1993, the other was "on permanent loan" to a graduate student who had since vanished into a quant firm in Chicago. The bookstore’s price for a new copy was $180—roughly the cost of Leo’s weekly ramen budget for an entire semester. Years later, Leo became a professor himself
“Given two sorted arrays of sizes m and n, find the k-th smallest element in the union of the two arrays in O(log m + log n) time. Implement in the language of your choice within the embedded editor below. You have one hour.” The university library had two: one was eaten