This may sound a bit weird but one of my hobbies is mathematics. Well, there is an unsolved problem called the "3X+1" problem that you can find by doing a google search. I have been working on this problem for a few weeks and have come to a very simplistic and logical proof for this problem, but lack the mathematical training to convert the logic into math. I do believe that it is simple enough that any respectable math professor at a university would be able to review it and accept the logic but also help me in coming up with a formalized proof. However, I don't know how to go about with this process. Should I first mail this to myself and have close family review it and sign off in case someone else reviews the proof and tries to claim it as their own? I don't like to be cynical but if this is a real proof than I would like to have some credit to my name for coming up with it. I wouldn't mind a professor of mathematics co-authoring a paper with me and sharing split credit, though. What should I do? What is the process? If I have achieved this, I'd like to use it on my resume for getting into a good graduate school. Thanks.
Holy shit Aphie...we went and looked at the websites and truthfully, it is Chinese to us. Bob has advanced Math degrees and he thinks you need a couple of girlfriends or a more challenging job to take up some of this valuable time. A more useful one is trisecting an angle geometrically. Put your huge brain to that problem. I would imagine this all has some purpose. Could you let us in on what it proves exactly? Not the math, but what the solution means? As far as getting your paper written, go to a local university and talk to the math department head and see what he/she says. You have several to choose from where you live.
Understanding what the problem says is not hard at all -- it is simple arithmetic according to the descriptions I've read on many websites. However, the proof for whatever reason has eluded people since it was first conjectured. I have no idea if someone has solved it or not, but I'd be interested to see their proof compared to the one I am close to finalizing. The only purpose in my mind is that there was a challenge and open problems are begging to be solved. Most of them are well beyond my level of math and in areas of math that I have never even heard of. This one was interesting because, for such a simple problem, you'd expect a simple proof.
...suck it up and submit it as a letter to Annals of Mathematics or some other pure math journal (I'm forty years out of touch on pure math). Worst that can happen is that you get abused less by the assigned reviewer than you do here every day.
...see, whaddi tellya? No math journal reviewer is going to be as as ugly to you as LongShot just was! Use an alias when you submit your letter so there are no public consequences, something with a nice mathematical ring like Abscissa Surd or Cardinal Ordinal or Prime Hypoteneuse.
Are you kidding.. "they" get thousands of cranks submitting their "proofs".. oh well.. what's one more..
...you are an innumerate horse's ass, just like the reviewer who rejected the engineering proof I submitted at age 19 that all odd numbers are prime. I quote from my letter: "One, three, five, seven, so far so good, nine, uh oh bad data point, eleven, thirteen! QED!"
...since this is Shit-Shat and we're not cluttering up any naive newbie's earnest thread, do you have a math background? It gets very lonely out here among all the unwashed arrogant high school dropouts, liberal arts majors, and jocks who don't understand that mathematicians have a God-given edge in the markets.
I looked at the problem again and realized it can have an application to trading. Fractals and decreasing cycles. Otherwise known as triangle patterns and pivots. Now this becomes more interesting to me. Hmmmm.