Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition.

In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story direct from the Quanta website about developments in basic science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Hash tables are among the most familiar and thoroughly studied data structures in computer science.

A university student and two colleagues have surprised the field by inventing a new kind of hash table

that works faster than anyone expected. That's next.

Check out this feed every Tuesday for the Quantipod anyone expected. That's next.

Check out this feed every Tuesday for the Quanta podcast. That's where editor-in-chief,

Samir Patel, talks to our writers and editors about more of Quanta's most popular, interesting,

and thought-provoking stories. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krupp even, an undergraduate at Rutgers University,

encountered a paper that would change his life. At the time, Krupp even didn't even give it

much thought. But two years later, when he finally set aside time to go through the paper just for fun, his efforts would lead to a rethinking of a widely used tool in computer science.

The paper's title, Tiny Pointers, referred to arrow-like entities that can direct you to a piece of information or

element in a computer's memory. Krupp even soon came up with a potential way to further

miniaturize the pointers so they consumed less memory. However, to achieve that, he needed a better

way of organizing the data that the pointers would

point to. He turned to a common approach for storing data known as a hash table. But in the

midst of his tinkering, Krupp even realized that he had invented a new kind of hash table, one

that worked faster than expected, taking less time and fewer steps to find specific elements.

Martin Farage Colton, a co-author of the Tiny Pointer's paper and Krupp even's former professor

at Rutgers, was initially skeptical of Krupp even's new design. Hash tables are among the

most thoroughly studied data structures in all of computer

...