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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...