On the intimate association between even binary palindromic words and the Collatz-Hailstone iterations

Abstract

The celebrated $3x+1$ problem is reformulated via the use of an analytic expression of the trailing zeros sequence resulting in a single branch formula $f(x)+1$ with a unique fixed point. The resultant formula $f(x)$ is also found to coincide with that of the discrete derivative of the sorted sequence of fixed points of the reflection operator on even binary palindromes of fixed even length \textit{2k} in any interval $[0\cdots2^{2k}-1]$. A set of equivalent reformulations of the problem are also presented.