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kevinwangyesterday at 1:36 PM0 repliesview on HN

Yeah but the Collatz probably has one of the highest man-hours of actual waste.

Ergo: > “This is a really dangerous problem. People become obsessed with it and it really is impossible,” said Jeffrey Lagarias, a mathematician at the University of Michigan and an expert on the Collatz conjecture.

and

> “Collatz is a notoriously difficult problem — so much so that mathematicians tend to preface every discussion of it with a warning not to waste time working on it,” said Joshua Cooper of the University of South Carolina in an email.

(from https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-proves-huge-res... )