What’s new in hash tables?
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location:
32-D463 (✮ Star ✮)
Speaker:
Martin Farach-Colton (NYU)
Biography:
Martin Farach-Colton is the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU, where he works on pure and applied algorithms in I/O-efficient storage systems, streaming algorithms and string matching. He was Founder and CTO at Tokutek, Inc, an enterprise database company, which was acquired by Percona in 2015. He has been a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs (1997-98) and was an early employee of Google, Inc. (2000-2002). Farach-Colton received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Farach-Colton is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, and a Fellow of the Argentine National Academy of Sciences.
Seminar group:
The hash table was the very first (and second) data structure invented. So you would think we’d know pretty much all there is to know about them. Yet the last few years have seen the resolution of some surprisingly basic questions. In this talk, I’ll survey these new results and touch on how the new theory has lead to new practice.