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Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.

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Claim. The answer to Problem 867 is no. The claimed result is Theorem 2.1 of D. Coppersmith and S. Phillips, On a question of Erdős on subsequence sums: for every NN there is a set A⊆{1,…,N}A\subseteq\{1,\ldots,N\} with

∣A∣≥1324N−O(1)\lvert A\rvert\ge\frac{13}{24}N-O(1)

in which no sum of two or more consecutive members is a member, so ∣A∣−N/2\lvert A\rvert-N/2 grows like N/24N/24 and the bound N/2+O(1)N/2+O(1) fails. The proof opens from Freud's four-block construction and improves its density 1936\tfrac{19}{36} to 1324\tfrac{13}{24} with the paper's own Table 1; the O(1)O(1) is the paper's, which prints no count of the removed boundary elements. The same paper's Theorem 3.7 bounds every such set by 23N−⌊N/512⌋+3log⁡4N−12\tfrac23N-\lfloor N/512\rfloor+3\log_4N-\tfrac12 members, so the maximal density lies in [1324,23−1512][\tfrac{13}{24},\tfrac23-\tfrac1{512}]; its exact value is the paper's Open Question 1 and is not the site's question. Freud's note reports the paper's upper bound as 23−13584\tfrac23-\tfrac1{3584}, a figure the published paper does not print. Both theorems are stated as the source card records them; the proof of Theorem 2.1 is followed but not independently checked.

Depends on. Nothing in this wiki: the proof restates Freud's blocks in its own terms as its starting point, and Table 1 and its verification are the paper's own.

Acceptance. Refereed publication: SIAM J. Discrete Math. 9 (1996), no. 2, 173--177, doi:10.1137/S0895480193244139, received February 1993 and accepted in revised form April 1995, in the May 1996 issue (Crossref record, 2026-10-07; the day is filled to the first of the month). Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, credits [CoPh96] with the best known bounds on the maximal size of such a set, and the thread comment of 2025-09-02 that led to the disproved label cited the paper, by its DOI, for the better lower bound 1324\tfrac{13}{24} and the upper bound 23−1512\tfrac23-\tfrac1{512}. The site's label and its Lean qualifier rest on Freud's construction, recorded on its own claim page.