Numerical Universality and Cyclic Attractors in a Two-Branch Piecewise Arithmetic Mapping

This paper is the story of a personal math experiment. I wanted to see what happens to numbers if we change the rules of standard math puzzles. I decided to add a rule: f(n) = n/2 + 1. I wrote a Python script on Google Colab to test what happens. My computer calculated the first 100,000,000 numbers. I thought some numbers would fly away to infinity, but they didn't. Absolutely every single number got trapped into exactly 7 repeating loops. I am presenting these results to the world as an open conjecture.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-25
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22967965
Primary Topic
Mathematics and Applications
Type
article
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Numerical Universality and Cyclic Attractors in a Two-Branch Piecewise Arithmetic Mapping

Reda Belakbir
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Mathematics and Applications
article

Numerical Universality and Cyclic Attractors in a Two-Branch Piecewise Arithmetic Mapping

Reda Belakbir
article en

Abstract

This paper is the story of a personal math experiment. I wanted to see what happens to numbers if we change the rules of standard math puzzles. I decided to add a rule: f(n) = n/2 + 1. I wrote a Python script on Google Colab to test what happens. My computer calculated the first 100,000,000 numbers. I thought some numbers would fly away to infinity, but they didn't. Absolutely every single number got trapped into exactly 7 repeating loops. I am presenting these results to the world as an open conjecture.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Openalex Percentile: Top 6%
Mathematics and Applications
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Numerical Universality and Cyclic Attractors in a Two-Branch Piecewise Arithmetic Mapping — Reda Belakbir · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS