Bloom filters are an essential class of probabilistic data structures designed for rapid set membership testing while minimising memory usage. By utilising multiple hash functions, these structures ...

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.