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.

People have been working on perfecting hashing since computing's early days. The result has been an almost endless number of hashing methods and tables. Facebook has faced this problem as well. Within ...

That assumption refers to hash tables, and a conjecture based on work from the 1980s regarding the optimal way to store and query the data in them. The student, formerly of Rutgers University in ...