I need assistance ...

LongShot · Dec 13, 2003

Quote from hypostomus:

...since this is Shit-Shat and we're not cluttering up any naive newbie's earnest thread, do you have a math background? It gets very lonely out here among all the unwashed arrogant high school dropouts, liberal arts majors, and jocks who don't understand that mathematicians have a God-given edge in the markets.

no, but i stayed at a holiday inn once..

i believe that..

"A man's got to know his limitations.."

hypostomus · Dec 13, 2003

...now you've really pissed me off! I challenge you to a duel at 100 yards with out-of-the-box Beretta 92F's with one clip each of Government-issue ball ammo. The first duelist to die laughing loses!

LongShot · Dec 13, 2003

Quote from hypostomus:

...now you've really pissed me off! I challenge you to a duel at 100 yards with out-of-the-box Beretta 92F's with one clip each of Government-issue ball ammo. The first duelist to die laughing loses!

no thanks just knowing i make more $$ than you is enuf for me..

hypostomus · Dec 13, 2003

...I can beat that! I'll bet I lose more money than you do!

aphexcoil · Dec 13, 2003

I'm not claiming my proof is correct or can withstand peer scrutiny (well they aren't even my peers since I'm not a mathematician). However, I wanted to take a stab at it -- so what do I have to lose? I'm putting together a nice presentation.

Perhaps I'll go down the U of M and check out the math professors there. I'd like to have someone look at it before I go and "embarrass" myself in some publication.

Mr Subliminal · Dec 13, 2003

You remind me of myself as a youth. I desperately wanted to have a heavenly body named after me as there was no shortage of amateur astronomers who, by accident or design, had gained this distinction. I would gaze upwards into the skies nightly, looking for that heretofore unnamed object that would eventually bear my name. After 2 years of persistent stargazing, I was finally rewarded when the medical profession named the rare neck muscle condition I had developed after me.

LongShot · Dec 13, 2003

Quote from Mr Subliminal:

You remind me of myself as a youth. I desperately wanted to have a heavenly body named after me as there was no shortage of amateur astronomers who, by accident or design, had gained this distinction. I would gaze upwards into the skies nightly, looking for that heretofore unnamed object that would eventually bear my name. After 2 years of persistent stargazing, I was finally rewarded when the medical profession named the rare neck muscle condition I had developed after me.

crick??

good luck to you aphie but i think i'll go chase skirt and get drunk..

do they give awards for this?? :eek:

"oh another saturday night and i aint got no honey i got some money cause i just got paid..."

hypostomus · Dec 13, 2003

...many notable mathemagicians were amateurs, so WTF. And Mr. Subliminal's post is a great reminder that we were most of us frustrated at something or other, elsewise we wouldn't be doing something now as disreputable as trading.

nitro · Dec 13, 2003

I have heard of this problem. This is the approach I would take, as I like to approach problems like this algebraically:

http://www.numbertheory.org/pdfs/survey.pdf

This is also one of the clearst papers written on it on a relatively fundamental level.

nitro

Quote from aphexcoil:

This may sound a bit weird but one of my hobbies is mathematics. Well, there is an unsolved problem called the "3X+1" problem that you can find by doing a google search.

I have been working on this problem for a few weeks and have come to a very simplistic and logical proof for this problem, but lack the mathematical training to convert the logic into math. I do believe that it is simple enough that any respectable math professor at a university would be able to review it and accept the logic but also help me in coming up with a formalized proof.

However, I don't know how to go about with this process. Should I first mail this to myself and have close family review it and sign off in case someone else reviews the proof and tries to claim it as their own? I don't like to be cynical but if this is a real proof than I would like to have some credit to my name for coming up with it. I wouldn't mind a professor of mathematics co-authoring a paper with me and sharing split credit, though.

What should I do? What is the process?

If I have achieved this, I'd like to use it on my resume for getting into a good graduate school.

Thanks.

aphexcoil · Dec 13, 2003

Quote from nitro:

I have heard of this problem. This is the approach I would take, as I like to approach problems like this algebraically:

http://www.numbertheory.org/pdfs/survey.pdf

This is also one of the clearst papers written on it on a relatively fundamental level.

nitro

That's a good paper. I hadn't found that one. I personally had to turn to a totally different way of looking at the problem compared to everything I read.

I basically proved at first that you do not need to prove that all positive intergers will reduce to the 4,2,1 pattern. All you need to do is prove it for even numbers and that will cover odd numbers as well.

Once I did that, I did a few things that relate closely to prime number theory and something very interesting happened ...

Pattern Expansion in Picture Form