The Collatz Conjecture is defined by a rule simple enough for a child to follow. No matter what number you start with, the ...

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 ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

Related video: Check out some other brain-busting math problems above. Earlier this month, the long-awaited answer to a decades-old math problem was celebrated by mathletes everywhere, and now we’re ...

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 ...