Knuth was Sedgewick's Ph.D. advisor and if I remember correctly Sedgewick's Ph.D. was on a very careful analysis of the actual running time of quicksort and it'

Knuth was Sedgewick's Ph.D. advisor and if I remember correctly Sedgewick's Ph.D. was on a very careful analysis of the actual running time of quicksort and it's variations. Edit: yes it was, see [1] [1] Sedgewick, R.: Quicksort. Stanford University, Stanford Computer Science Report STAN-CS-75-492, Ph. D. Thesis, May 1975