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Published February 11, 2026 | Version 1.1
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Structural Reduction of the Collatz Conjecture to the Dynamics of an Induced Function

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This work develops a structural reformulation of the Collatz conjecture based on the decomposition of trajectories into maximal odd segments and the introduction of an induced map acting on their segment-starts. The conjecture is shown to be equivalent to an eventual descent property for this induced function. Odd integers of the form 4n+1 are identified as structural critical points (“portals”) where binary information is reorganized. The analysis isolates the core difficulty of the problem, reducing it to a precise arithmetic question concerning the distribution of 2-adic valuations of certain exponential expressions.

This is the English version of the paper originally written in Spanish.

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Is version of
Preprint: 10.5281/zenodo.18611072 (DOI)

Dates

Submitted
2026-02-11