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 ...

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.

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 ...