Seventy years after the invention of a data structure called a hash table, theoreticians have found the most efficient possible configuration for it. About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, encountered a paper that would change his life.

I had an interesting realization tonight: I’m terrified of hash tables. Specifically, my work on JRuby (and even more directly, my work optimizing JRuby) has made me terrified to ever consider using a ...

It isn't often that a decades-old assumption underpinning modern technology is overturned, but a recent paper based on the work of an undergraduate and his two co-authors has done just that.… That ...