History
Kozen states that Cobham and Edmonds are "generally credited with the invention of the notion of polynomial time." Cobham invented the class as a robust way of characterizing efficient algorithms, leading to Cobham's thesis. However, H. C. Pocklington, in a 1910 paper, analyzed two algorithms for solving quadratic congruences, and observed that one took time "proportional to a power of the logarithm of the modulus" and contrasted this with one that took time proportional "to the modulus itself or its square root", thus explicitly drawing a distinction between an algorithm that ran in polynomial time versus one that did not.
Read more about this topic: P (complexity)
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