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.

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 ...

It isn't often that a decades-old assumption underpinning modern technology is overturned, but a recent paper based on the work of an undergraduate and his two co-authors has done just that.… That ...