The document discusses the merge sort algorithm which uses a divide and conquer approach. It works by recursively dividing an array into two halves and then merging the sorted halves. The key steps are: 1) Divide - Divide the array into equal halves repeatedly until arrays can no longer be divided. 2) Conquer - Sort the individual arrays using any sorting algorithm. 3) Combine - Merge the sorted halves back into a single sorted array by comparing elements pair-wise from both halves and writing them into the correct position in the new array. The overall time complexity of merge sort is O(n log n) as in each recursion step, the problem size halves, resulting in log n recursive calls.