Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 18th of April 2007, 3:00-3:50

Groups and Dynamics Seminar


5x+1: how many go down?

Stanislav Volkov of University of Bristol, United Kingdom

I will talk about how probabilistic methods of analyzing randomly-labeled trees can provide an important insight on the 5x+1 version of the famous Collatz problem (3x+1). Though no rigorous results about number theory will be proved in my talk, a number of  properties of the trees with random labels will be rigorously established. The work is inspired by Yakov Sinai's earlier work on the statistic of 3x+1 problem.