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Let be an irrational number. Is it true that if, for all large ,
then and for some integers and ?
Let be an irrational number and let with . Is it true that if, for all large ,
then for some integer ?
Source: erdosproblems.com/998
An accepted solution exists. The statement is true.
The site, accessed 2026-09-04 (page last edited 2025-10-05), labels the problem PROVED and credits Kesten [Ke66]. The corrected Statement is proved: necessity is Kesten's Theorem 4 and sufficiency the theorem of Hecke and Ostrowski, accepted on the Kesten page. Alexeev's Lean disproof of the site's wording, on the Alexeev page, is a rejected claim page, since it answers the site's wording rather than the corrected Statement.
The site's wording is Erdős's. In [Er64b], p. 62, after the theorem
of Hecke and Ostrowski (display (24)) that when both
and are of the form , Erdős writes: "Szüsz and I conjectured the
converse of this theorem, i.e. if (24) holds then ,
, unfortunately we had not been able to make any progress with
this conjecture"
(the conjecture card).
Boris Alexeev's Lean theorem not_erdos_998 (formal authors Codex and GPT-5.6
Sol) refutes that endpoint converse for , . The site
labels the problem PROVED and its commentary says "This is true, and was
proved by Kesten [Ke66]." The theorem credited, Theorem 4 of Kesten's paper
(Acta Arith. 12 (1966), p. 193), is the length criterion: for fixed and
with , the discrepancy of is bounded in if
and only if for some integer . Kesten writes that this
"confirms a recent conjecture of Erdős and Szüsz [2]" and, in Section 4, that
"except for a slight modification this was conjectured by Erdős and Szüsz
([2], p. 61)"; the modification is the passage from the two endpoints to the
length, made by the prover and adopted by the site's label and attribution.
The page follows that reading. The corrected Statement replaces the conclusion
" and for some integers and " by
" for some integer " and adds Kesten's range
, , which excludes only the full interval , whose
discrepancy is identically and whose length is not a fractional part;
nothing else changes. Under the corrected Statement the answer is yes:
sufficiency is the theorem of Hecke [He22] and Ostrowski [Os27], [Os30] that
the site's commentary calls the converse, and necessity is Kesten [Ke66]
(Kesten's claim page (1966),
accepted, full, refereed). Under the site's wording the answer is no, by
Alexeev's Lean disproof, recorded on
a claim page (Alexeev, 2026)
rejected because it answers the site's wording (both endpoints on the orbit),
not the corrected Statement (the length on the orbit), so it does not count
toward the problem's standing. The anchored case of the site's
wording, that a bounded-discrepancy interval has , is
true and is the case of Kesten's necessity reconstructed on
the theorem page.