At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

(via Veritasium) The Collatz Conjecture is the simplest math problem no one can solve — it is easy enough for almost anyone to understand but notoriously difficult to solve.

Alex Smith, a 20-year-old British engineering student, has proved that a Turing machine proposed by complexity guru Stephen Wolfram is in fact the simplest possible computer capable of solving every ...