In 1934 a German Mathematician by the name of Lothar Collatz introduced a conjecture that is now known as “The Collatz Conjecture”. The reason why this conjecture is so famous is because its rules are simple enough for a 3rd grader to understand; yet it has puzzled mathematicians for almost a century and still remains unsolved.
The instructions are simple; first we must pick any positive number, if the number is odd, we multiply it by three and add one; but if it’s even we divide by two. For example, if we start with 5; we multiply 5 by 3 and add one, giving us 16, 16 gets divided into 8, 8 divided into 4 which is divided again into 2, again divided into 1 which in turn gets multiplied up to 4; but here we get stuck in a loop. No matter what number we choose it will always end up in the 4-2-1 loop; or so we think. This is the questions mathematicians have been asking for so long; “Does the Collatz sequence eventually reach 1 for all positive integer initial values?”.
Mathematicians have tested 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 numbers but have still not encountered one that does not end up back in the loop. This conjecture has become infamous among mathematicians with many claiming that we are not intelligent enough to solve it; still many people attempt to find a number that proves it false.
Sophie Pilgrim