Collatz-Intro - Introduction

Workshop
Recreational
Mathematics

Gottfried Helms Univ. Kassel

mailto: helms at uni-kassel

www: math-homepage

 

 

Introduction

 

With this short series of articles I'm building a compilation of my attempts to deal with or solve ;-) the Collatz-problem. It was - in all successlessnes - a wide spectrum of subjects, that I came across and that I learned as new stuff. So the following might give insight in some number-theoretic threads, partly more than I found in various equally-amateurish collatz-pages around- so I decided finally to put up this site to share my thoughts and results.

 

Since the dealing with mathematical puzzles of such a dimension (which I didn't expect, when I entered this problem first time back in the seventies) one has to know his limitations in abilities to prove this and that.

 

The collatz-problem can be attacked from the pure number-theoretic approach, from set theory, from graph-theory and in all these fields one comes very quickly to simple stated, but deep and difficult and still unsolved problems.