On the non-existence of non-trivial Collatz cycles: a conditional formal proof in Lean 4 with documented structural obstructions

Fuente: Zenodo
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Merle, Eric
Formato: Recurso digital
Publicado: Zenodo 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866902312002256896
author Merle, Eric
author_facet Merle, Eric
contents <p>We address the no-non-trivial-cycle disjunct of the Collatz conjecture. The central result, formalized in Lean 4 with Mathlib v4.27.0, is a conditional non-existence theorem declared parametrically with three structural hypotheses: BakerSeparation (after Baker 1966), BarinaVerification (after the 2025 computational verification that every positive integer below 2^71 reaches 1), and ProductBoundThreshold, a project-derived cycle-complexity bound made fully explicit in the paper. The Lean formalization is machine-verified with kernel-3 axiom profile, no user axioms and no sorry, and is reproducible via reproduce.sh against an explicit expected_axioms.md baseline.</p> <p>We complement the theorem with two impossibility lemmas (delta-8, delta-8') showing that no uniform algebraic refinement of the Product Bound derivation can eliminate the third hypothesis within the Baker + continued-fraction framework; a literature mapping (delta-9) documenting the absence of any peer-reviewed deterministic upper bound on cycle length in the 1977-2026 results we surveyed; and an alternative disjunctive framing (delta-7) that connects the conditional theorem to Hercher's 2023 lower bound.</p> <p>Source code repository: https://github.com/ericmerle3789/collatz-conditional-cycles (branch main, release v1.0). License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).</p>
format Recurso digital
id zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_19790406
institution Zenodo
language
publishDate 2026
publisher Zenodo
record_format zenodo
spellingShingle On the non-existence of non-trivial Collatz cycles: a conditional formal proof in Lean 4 with documented structural obstructions
Merle, Eric
Collatz conjecture
3x+1 problem
Collatz cycles
linear forms in logarithms
Baker's theorem
continued fractions
irrationality measure
formal verification
Lean 4
Mathlib
<p>We address the no-non-trivial-cycle disjunct of the Collatz conjecture. The central result, formalized in Lean 4 with Mathlib v4.27.0, is a conditional non-existence theorem declared parametrically with three structural hypotheses: BakerSeparation (after Baker 1966), BarinaVerification (after the 2025 computational verification that every positive integer below 2^71 reaches 1), and ProductBoundThreshold, a project-derived cycle-complexity bound made fully explicit in the paper. The Lean formalization is machine-verified with kernel-3 axiom profile, no user axioms and no sorry, and is reproducible via reproduce.sh against an explicit expected_axioms.md baseline.</p> <p>We complement the theorem with two impossibility lemmas (delta-8, delta-8') showing that no uniform algebraic refinement of the Product Bound derivation can eliminate the third hypothesis within the Baker + continued-fraction framework; a literature mapping (delta-9) documenting the absence of any peer-reviewed deterministic upper bound on cycle length in the 1977-2026 results we surveyed; and an alternative disjunctive framing (delta-7) that connects the conditional theorem to Hercher's 2023 lower bound.</p> <p>Source code repository: https://github.com/ericmerle3789/collatz-conditional-cycles (branch main, release v1.0). License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).</p>
title On the non-existence of non-trivial Collatz cycles: a conditional formal proof in Lean 4 with documented structural obstructions
topic Collatz conjecture
3x+1 problem
Collatz cycles
linear forms in logarithms
Baker's theorem
continued fractions
irrationality measure
formal verification
Lean 4
Mathlib
url https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19790406