What is an NP Complete problem?

At first it seems rather surprising that NP-complete problems should even exist, but in the celebrated Cook-Levin theorem (independently proved by Leonid Levin), Cook proved that the Boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete (a simpler, but still highly technical proof of this is available). In 1972 Richard Karp proved that several other problems were also NP-complete (see Karp's 21 NP-complete problems); thus there is a class of NP-complete problems (besides the Boolean satisfiability problem). Since Cook's original results, thousands of other problems have been shown to be NP-complete by reductions from other problems previously shown to be NP-complete; many of these problems are collected in Garey and Johnson's 1979 book Computers and Intractability: A Guide to NP-Completeness.