Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Statement. Put for , and . Then is Sidon and meets every infinite arithmetic progression in , so its complement contains none. The set therefore answers Problem 198 negatively.
Source. The public problem page attributes this explicit construction to AlphaProof. Its discussion links an AI-assisted formalization. The source record distinguishes that report from the natural-language proof below and from a reproduced build.
Proof. Every is positive, and for ,
Thus the doubling-gap lemma makes a Sidon set, including uniqueness of sums with equal summands.
Let with and . Set . Since , the integer divides . Hence
This point also belongs to , so cannot be contained in the complement. The case is included, and all elements of are positive.
Method. The index fixes a residue class while factorial divisibility removes the nonlinear term modulo any prescribed step. Rapid growth prevents collisions of two-term sums. This is an explicit instance of the same separation mechanism as the enumeration construction.
Bears on. Problem 198: the set is a Sidon set whose complement contains no infinite arithmetic progression, a negative answer.