...now you've really pissed me off! I challenge you to a duel at 100 yards with out-of-the-box Beretta 92F's with one clip each of Government-issue ball ammo. The first duelist to die laughing loses!
I'm not claiming my proof is correct or can withstand peer scrutiny (well they aren't even my peers since I'm not a mathematician). However, I wanted to take a stab at it -- so what do I have to lose? I'm putting together a nice presentation. Perhaps I'll go down the U of M and check out the math professors there. I'd like to have someone look at it before I go and "embarrass" myself in some publication.
You remind me of myself as a youth. I desperately wanted to have a heavenly body named after me as there was no shortage of amateur astronomers who, by accident or design, had gained this distinction. I would gaze upwards into the skies nightly, looking for that heretofore unnamed object that would eventually bear my name. After 2 years of persistent stargazing, I was finally rewarded when the medical profession named the rare neck muscle condition I had developed after me.
crick?? good luck to you aphie but i think i'll go chase skirt and get drunk.. do they give awards for this?? :eek: "oh another saturday night and i aint got no honey i got some money cause i just got paid..."
...many notable mathemagicians were amateurs, so WTF. And Mr. Subliminal's post is a great reminder that we were most of us frustrated at something or other, elsewise we wouldn't be doing something now as disreputable as trading.
I have heard of this problem. This is the approach I would take, as I like to approach problems like this algebraically: http://www.numbertheory.org/pdfs/survey.pdf This is also one of the clearst papers written on it on a relatively fundamental level. nitro
That's a good paper. I hadn't found that one. I personally had to turn to a totally different way of looking at the problem compared to everything I read. I basically proved at first that you do not need to prove that all positive intergers will reduce to the 4,2,1 pattern. All you need to do is prove it for even numbers and that will cover odd numbers as well. Once I did that, I did a few things that relate closely to prime number theory and something very interesting happened ... Pattern Expansion in Picture Form