Bio

Joao Carlos Leandro da Silva was born in Lisbon, Portugal, but since a young age has lived in many different countries. He obtained his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Upon returning to do his military service, he pursued graduate studies in theoretical physics and worked as a teaching assistant in the physics department of the Instituto Superior Técnico. In order to complement his basic research in physics, he was for a short period a scientific associate at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He then worked as an assistant engineer for Samsung Corporation and later as a research engineer for several smaller companies in Italy. Presently, he is a consultant in cryptography. His research interests are in both pure and experimental mathematics and in understanding the role of NKS in random processes.

Project: Collatz Type Systems

Recently there has been some progress on the Collatz conjecture, otherwise known as the 3n+1 problem. In particular Adrian German has discovered some nested patterns that show some structure. For this project, variants of the 3n+1 problem were investigated from the point of view of Adrian’s techniques. As a result certain variants are identified as having similar dynamical properties as the original Collatz problem.

Favorite Four-Color, Nearest-Neighbor, Totalistic Rule

Rule chosen: 46533