Collatz 3n + 1 conjecture possibly solved (johndcook.com)

Title changed. Thanks.

Fwiw, the author of the paper did his PhD work with Collatz himself, though that was over 40 years ago (http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=27958). Not conclusive, but makes me inclined to consider it a serious effort. Not qualified to judge beyond that, though.

I will look at it this weekend. If true, the productivity of math departments everywhere will go up. I know so many that banged their heads on this one for a while. I once wasted an entire week playing with this on the Symbolics. It's horribly addicting because of it's simplicity.

I'm not really a mathematician yet, but I skimmed the paper and the approach seemed reasonable when taken at face value.

Then again, I said the same thing when Penny Smith published her paper on NSE.

I can't say, I looked at this briefly and was hoping for an elementary proof. This paper casts the problem in terms of linear operators over holomorphic function spaces and assumes a number of prior results in that area, and it's been far too long since I read complex analysis.

In some sense it's a little unsatisfying that a simple proof has not been found, but this is what makes math so addicting I suppose.

Was the title edited? It now says possibly solved, which certainly admits that the proof hasn't been reviewed, much less acclaimed.

Speaking of which, was that NP≠P paper debunked? What came of that?

Roy Adler made that same, which reminds me, I wonder if Erdos offered money for this one?