Collatz

1. box.
2. a
3. conducting
4. in
5. involving a
6. suggested
7. found out;
8. cat
10. experiments
11. she took
12. who once
13. the ethics committee,
14. of mine
16. radioactive
17. at this,
20. about
21. told us stories
22. immediately
24. a professor
26. tipped off
28. a friend
32. ordeal over a
34. offense
40. telling them
42. My professor
44. She said she
48. I know
52. and
56. One day,
64. of his friend's

About the maths:

The Collatz conjecture is an open question about how numbers relate to each other. Take any natural number $n_0$; if $n_0$ is odd, let $n_1$ be $3n_0+1$; otherwise let $n_1$ be $n_0/2$. Define $n_2$ by doing the same to $n_1$, and so on. We conjecture that for any starting number $n_0$, the sequence of $n$'s eventually reaches some $i$ such that $n_i=1$. Is this true or not? Nobody knows.

This thing (I can barely call it a poem) contains Collatz orbits containing only numbers less than or equal to 64. It is therefore a low-effort piece, because I have a midterm in two hours (oops)

I generated this using code adapted from this visualisation.