Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz ...

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 ...