This document introduces various algorithms and functions from the Python standard library that can be used to implement algorithms elegantly and concisely. It discusses functions from the functools module for manipulating functions like partial objects to provide default arguments, and the update_wrapper() function to copy attributes from the original function. It also covers iterator functions from the itertools module like chain() to merge iterators, imap() similar to map(), and count() to produce consecutive integers. Functions like cycle() to indefinitely repeat an iterator and dropwhile()/takewhile() to filter iterators based on conditions are also summarized.