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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...