““The notion of amortization arises from the following observation. Given a sequence of operations, we may wish to know the running time of the entire sequence, but not care about the running time of any individual operation. For instance, given a sequence of n operations, we may wish to bound the total running time of the sequence by O(n) without insisting that every individual operation run in O(1) time. We might be satisfied if a few operations run in O(log n) or even O(n) time, provided the total cost of the sequence is only O(n). This freedom opens up a wide design space of possible solutions, and often yields new solutions that are simpler and faster than worst-case solutions with equivalent bounds.””