Tunisian Student Rayen Aouni Claims to Have Found a New Approach to Solving the Collatz Conjecture
Rayen Aouni, a Tunisian student at the Faculty of Medicine in Sousse, asserts that he has proposed a new approach to resolving the Collatz Conjecture, one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. His method will soon be presented at Sapienza Università di Roma in Italy and Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, two renowned institutions in the field.
The Collatz Conjecture, also known as the "3n+1" problem, has intrigued researchers for nearly a century. The rule is simple: if a number is even, divide it by two; if it's odd, multiply it by three and add one. By repeating this process, all tested numbers seem to eventually reach 1, but no one has been able to prove it for all positive integers. Even renowned mathematicians like Terence Tao have only achieved partial results.
Instead of following the entire sequence of numbers, Rayen Aouni focuses solely on odd values. He introduces a variable, xₖ, which indicates how many divisions by two are needed to reach an odd number again. According to him, this variable is not random but rather follows a deterministic mechanism, contradicting some existing probabilistic approaches.
His work, already made public, has been published on several international scientific platforms such as Figshare, ScienceOpen, OSF, and Academia.edu. It is also associated with an ORCID identifier, recognized by major global scientific databases.
For Rayen Aouni, this approach illustrates the possibility of "finding hidden order beneath chaos." Although he is not a trained mathematician, he hopes that his proposal will spark careful examination within the scientific community. His presentations in Rome and Moscow will mark the first step in a journey he wishes to pursue beyond Tunisian academic borders.
