High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Timsort is a hybrid sorting algorithm, derived from merge sort and insertion sort, designed to perform well on many kinds of real-world data. It was invented by Tim Peters in 2002 for use in the Python programming language. The algorithm finds subsets of the data that are already ordered, and uses that knowledge to sort the remainder more efficiently. This is done by merging an identified subset, called a run, with existing runs until certain criteria are fulfilled. Timsort has been Python`s standard sorting algorithm since version 2.3. It is used to sort arrays in Java SE 7, and on the Android platform.