An undergraduate student has challenged a long-standing data science conjecture that had stood for 40 years.
Together, Krapivin (now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge), Farach-Colton (now at New York University) and Kuszmaul demonstrated in a January 2025 paper(opens a new tab) that this new hash table can indeed find elements faster than was considered possible. ln so doing, they had disproved a conjecture long held to be true.
“It’s an important paper,” said Alex Conway(opens a new tab) of Cornell Tech in New York City. “Hash tables are among the oldest data structures we have. And they’re still one of the most efficient ways to store data.” Yet open questions remain about how they work, he said. “This paper answers a couple of them in surprising ways.”
