Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades. Experienced mathematicians warn ...

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 ...

Kevin Lieber of Vsauce2 examines why the Collatz Conjecture is still a complex mathematical mystery.

A powerful technique called SAT solving could work on the notorious Collatz conjecture. But it’s a long shot. But Heule, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, has set his sights on an ...

Kevin Lieber of Vsauce2 examines the enduring mathematical enigma known as the Collatz Conjecture.

Some years ago, I wrote here about “hailstone numbers” (Follow that hailstone, 8 April 2016). These are numbers that are generated when you try your hand at the Collatz Conjecture—sometimes described ...

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 a deceptively simple math problem. It has only two rules. First, pick any number. If it's even, divide it by two. If it's odd, multiply it by three and add one. This will ...

This week, we’ve celebrated the long-awaited answer to a decades-old math problem, and now we’re one step closer to an even older numbers puzzle that has stumped the world’s brightest minds. But many ...