Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz ...

An attempt at tackling the intractable Collatz conjecture is a “noble failure” demonstrating the promise of automated reasoning techniques. The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout ...

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

The Collatz conjecture is also known as the “3n + 1” problem. It’s an easy problem to explain and check, and has been tested up into the nineteen figure range. But it’s only now that anyone has come ...

Seaweed? Worms? Bad hair day? The animation below is a new way to look at the Collatz conjecture, one of the most high-profile open problems in mathematics. The conjecture is easy to explain, given ...

We almost have a solution to an exceptionally tricky mathematical riddle first posed 82 years ago. The problem, known as the Collatz conjecture, is easy to state. Start with any positive whole number.

Part of the beauty of mathematics is that seemingly simple patterns lead to much more complicated questions and theories. The Collatz conjecture, which is the subject of a new video from YouTube ...