Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Theorem 1.4 of E. Ackelsberg and F. K. Richter, An inverse theorem for sumsets of sets of positive density in the integers, arXiv:2604.12864 (14 April 2026), cited as [AcRi26] on the problem page and digested on the library card ackelsberg_2026_inverse_theorem_sumsets_sets_positive_density, characterizes the pairs of Problem 335 in which one set meets every residue class. Let with and , and let meet every residue class, that is, for all . If along some sequence of scales , the density of being taken along that sequence, then for some there is a decomposition and with , and , so that lies in one residue class modulo , and one of two cases holds. In case (1), contains all of up to a set of density zero, and there are an irrational and closed intervals of the circle such that, with on , the sets and are and up to sets of density zero: up to density zero, and are lifts of parallel Bohr intervals from , and contains almost all of the other residue classes. In case (2), the degenerate case, again covers up to density zero along the scale sequence, has density zero along it, and and are each invariant along it, up to density zero, under every shift by an element of . The paper states that Theorem 1.4 resolves its Problem 1.5, the site's Problem 335, under the extra assumption that meets every residue class, and that the pairs of case (2) refute Erdős and Graham's speculation that every such pair arises from a rotation construction; Propositions 15.1 and 15.2 construct pairs in case (2), in Proposition 15.1 with of density zero.
Covers. The pairs with and in which one of the sets meets every residue class: for them the theorem determines the structure the problem asks for. Not covered: pairs in which neither set meets every residue class, where Example 1.6 of the paper, a random subset of the even numbers with and almost surely, shows structure outside the Bohr description; and pairs with , which the theorem's hypothesis excludes.
Depends on. No page of this wiki; the claim rests on the cited preprint.
Standing. Claimed. The paper is a preprint: its arXiv record carries one
version, of 2026-04-14, and no journal reference. The site's curator, T. F.
Bloom, records in the problem page's commentary that the problem is
partially resolved by this paper under the residue-class assumption, but the
site labels the problem OPEN (page last edited 2026-04-15), so the commentary
is not acceptance and no reviewed evidence is listed. The proof is not
checked here.