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 ...

The Collatz conjecture is an unsolved conjecture in mathematics. It is named after Lothar Collatz, who first proposed it in 1937. The conjecture is also known as the 3n + 1 conjecture, as the Ulam ...

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.