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| Photo: Andrew Daniels |
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 mathematicians, including
the one responsible for this newest breakthrough, think a complete answer to the 82-year-old riddle is still far away.
Terence
Tao is one of the greatest mathematicians of our time. At age 21, he
got his Ph.D. at Princeton. At 24, he became the youngest math professor
at UCLA—ever. And in 2006 he won the Fields Medal, known as the Nobel
Prize of math, at the age of 31.
One of the best things about Tao is that he really delivers on content, and openly shares it with the world. His blog is like a modern-day da Vinci’s notebook. Name a subject in advanced math, and he’s written about it.
So
this week, Tao takes us to the Collatz Conjecture. Proposed in 1937 by
German mathematician Lothar Collatz, the Collatz Conjecture is fairly
easy to describe, so here we go...
So, now that we know its counterexamples are rarer than ever, where does
that leave the problem? Are we one step away from a complete solution?
Well, even Tao says no.
Recommended Reading
10 of the Toughest Math Problems Ever Solved by Dave Linkletter, Ph.D. candidate in Pure Mathematics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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| Photo: Popular Science Monthly Volume 82 [Public domain]Wikimedia Commons. |
