Meaning of the constants that appear in the Master Theorem The general formula for time complexity is $T(n) = aT(n/c) + bn^k$.


If $a&gt; c^k$, the complexity is $O(n^{\log_c a})$.
If $a = c^k$, it is $O(n^k \log n)$.
If $a &lt; c^k$, it is $O(n^k)$.


$a$ is the amount of times the recursive function is called, but what do $b$, $c$, and $k$ represent?
That is not the general formula for time complexity. There is no "general formula  for time complexity", any more than there is a "general formula for the answer."

Rather, the formula you give is a recurrence relation that can be used to compute the running time of certain divide-and-conquer&ndash;style recursive algorithms.  Specifically, it corresponds to a recursive function which, when given an input of size&nbsp;$n$, makes $a$&nbsp;recursive calls, each on inputs of size $n/c$. If you pretended that the recursive calls were "free" (i.e., that they returned their answer in one computation step), then the algorithm would take $bn^k$ steps.