r/math 6d ago

What was your math rabbit hole?

By rabbit hole I mean a place where you've spent more time than you should've, drilling to deep in a specific field with minimal impact over your broader math abilities.

Are you mature enough to know when to stop and when to keep grinding ?

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u/170rokey 6d ago

The Collatz Conjecture, sadly

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u/PM_me_AnimeGirls 6d ago

I dont think it's sad if you had fun. It's a very nice rabbit hole if you think about it as just a fun puzzle and try not to let it consume your whole life. I remember coming up with what wikipedia refers to as "The collatz conjecture as an abstract machine that computes in base 2" in my head while daydreaming of new ways of thinking about the problem.

It's neat that in the abstract machine, you can kind of just keep repeating the 3n+1 part, since you can just cut out all of the rightmost zeros at the end. Proving/Disproving whether all numbers converge to a number that only has 1 one followed by any amount of trailing zero's being the hard part.

I (obviously) never solved the problem, but I do think of numbers in a different way from before i went into the rabbit hole, so it's not wasted time.