A Clustering Perspective of the Collatz Conjecture

Abstract

This manuscript focuses on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics, namely the Collatz conjecture. The first part of the paper is devoted to describe the problem, providing a historical introduction to it, as well as giving some intuitive arguments of why is it hard from the mathematical point of view. The second part is dedicated to the visualization of behaviors of the Collatz iteration function and the analysis of the results.

Keywords

• multidimensional scaling
• Collatz conjecture
• clustering methods