Binomial Heaps

Abstract

Binomial heaps were invented in 1978 by J. Vuillemin [106]. They give a data structure for maintaining a collection of elements, each of which has a value drawn from an ordered set, such that new elements can be added and the element of minimum value extracted efficiently. They admit the following operations:

• makeheap(i) return a new heap containing only element i

• findmin(h) return a pointer to the element of h of minimum value

• insert(h, i) add element i to heap h

• deletemin(h) delete the element of minimum value from h

• meld(h, h′) combine heaps h and h′ into one heap