Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For , the divisor function, and for , the number of distinct prime factors, the property asked in Problem 122 holds: for every with for almost all and, as [Er97] requires, , there are infinitely many along which the number of with , divided by , tends to infinity. Erdős reports the result in Problems in number theory, New Zealand J. Math. 26 (1997), 155--160, p. 155, and in Some of my favourite unsolved problems, Math. Japon. 46 (1997), 527--537, p. 533: he writes that he, Pomerance and Sárközy can prove it for and , and that it probably fails for and . Neither paper gives an argument and no publication of the proof is recorded; the site's commentary (page last edited 2026-04-01) repeats the report.
Covers. and , in the corrected reading of the question: for almost all , with the width as [Er97] requires. Every other , including and , for which Erdős expected the property to fail, is outside the claim.
Published results for . The paper of Erdős, Pomerance and Sárközy on locally repeated values, part IV (card; Ramanujan J. (1997), 227--241), proves results for at single widths only. Its Theorem 1 gives, for every large , some with more than values satisfying : clustering at a bounded width. Its method gives, as the site's commentary and the curator's thread comment of 2026-03-27 record, an interval of width about whose points all have in one interval of width about . Each result fixes one width and settles no instance of the property, which quantifies over every , so neither is a claim on this problem. In the same comment the curator, Thomas Bloom, wrote that the results Erdős describes do not really appear in that paper.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.
Acceptance. None recorded. Erdős's report is the poser's word that a proof
exists, with no argument to examine, and this page does not count it as
acceptance evidence. The site labels the problem OPEN (page last edited
2026-04-01) and its proof-claims tab carries no entry, so the commentary
repeating the report credits nothing. The curator's doubt of 2026-03-27 is
not a refutation. There is no refereed proof and no formalization, so the
claim stays claimed.