In this video, “UNCRACKABLE? The Collatz Conjecture – Numberphile”, David Eisenbud, a professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, describes the Collatz Conjecture as a problem that any fourth grader can understand. He uses as evidence various examples he writes down and refers to books by credible mathematicians. The audience is a big one containing inquisitive learners who may not be academicians, with the video having more than 1 million views. In short, the video introduces the Collatz Conjecture in a very nice way, showing why it is so easy to understand and in short, why it is so difficult to prove.
This could be very useful for my research because it pointed me to terms like trees and gave me a nice way to introduce the conjecture by comparing it to Hailstones falling down as the numbers following the mathematical formula in the problem. I got introduced to papers like the, “The Undeniability of the General Collatz Problem, ” which I could use for future research. This video was very useful in terms of the content it had and the papers it pointed me to.
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