Unsolved Math Problem (Collatz Conjecture)
Last year I spent some time working on the Collatz Conjecture. I realized recently that while I have not solved the conjecture, Steemit would be a good place to post what I have so far. This will act to time stamp my work and also to share it with others who may wish to build on anything useful herein. If you wish to learn about the Collatz Conjecture, I recommend the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3x_%2B_1_problem . It's really easy to grasp (a 4th grader could understand it in 2 minutes..but solving it is another matter)
I used a program called TexMaker which I hear is a must for college kids who need to create clean looking PDF's or final papers that have equations or uncommon symbols as part of the finished product. It worked well for me and took minimal effort to learn a few tips and tricks (getting the syntax right to create the document from code). Does anyone know a way to show a PDF file on a Steemit post? The best I could do for now is to add it page by page after using a converter lol. Anyway, I'm hoping this is the first time on Steemit that work on an unsolved math problem has been stored for the obvious reasons mentioned above. I need to continue work on Collatz Conjecture =).
Hey albensilverberg, I disliked maths my whole life, I get dizzy after watching this :P :P :P ! I want to focus especially on newcomers but also on people that are very active. My plan is to build up a community with active users to support each other. Looking forward to it, upvoted and following, Would you be interested? greetings Lena!
Of course! It's been great seeing the Steemit user base flourish over the past few months.
sounds great thanks a lot, what do you think about to build up a curation trail? greetings Lena !!
The Folks at Numberphile has a great video on this topic:
Ya I like Numberphile's videos :).
Yes, please share more about Collatz Conjecture. Wasn't aware of it before but you got me curious! :)
You guessed it. No other way at the moment. Grabbing screenshots while zooming in... then uploading here works.
Your pics are a little blurry there.
Thanks. And there's really no way yet (right?) to store pictures on the block chain is there? So if I upload pictures to a site online, they may not show up in this blog years from now.
Collatz Conjecture is a math sequence that always (as far as we know but it's not yet proven) returns to 1. Pick any positive whole number. Let's say you start with 5. If your number is odd, you always multiply by 3 and then add 1. 5x3=15+1=16. Now you have 16. Anytime you have an even number, you divide by 2 and you keep dividing by 2 until you end up with an odd number again. Then rinse and repeat by multiplying by 3 and adding 1.. etc. So 5 would turn into 16 which turns into 1. Now 1 is odd. So.. multiply by 3 gets you 3. Add 1 gets you 4. 4 divides by 2 until it hits 1 again. So now you're stuck.. 4,2,1..4,2,1.. forever. The conjecture is that all numbers will converge to 4,2,1. Some numbers grow very large before crashing back down to 4,2,1. I was working on methods of attack for solving this.