Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Przemek Chojecki, Consecutive totient patterns, manuscript dated
13 July 2026 (the second preprint link), posted on the problem's
discussion thread as the full solution. It reads the ordering patterns of
Problem 415 as the
strict orderings of distinct values, writes for the
largest such that every strict pattern of length occurs in some block
with , and answers the three questions
as follows.
- Theorem 1.1: as ,
with the -fold iterated logarithm, Euler's constant and ; the longest strictly decreasing block has the same asymptotic, and every fixed strict permutation occurs infinitely often. So no positive constant has ; the manuscript adds that if were allowed the literal answer would be vacuously yes, since .
- Proposition 1.2: , while . The decreasing pattern of length four occurs below while only of the strict patterns of that length do, the increasing one among the nine missing; so the decreasing pattern is not always the first to fail. The manuscript checks this by an exact sieve printed in its Appendix A.
- Proposition 1.3: for the natural ordering of is the tie , which has density by Erdős's 1936 theorem (Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 32, 530--540) that and each hold on a set of density , while each strict ordering has density ; so under the density reading the natural ordering is not the most likely to appear.
The upper bound in Theorem 1.1 is the decreasing-block bound of Pollack, Pomerance and Treviño (their claim page), which the manuscript reproves; the lower bound is a permutation-equivariant refinement of the construction in their Section 8. The manuscript says that its proof of Theorem 1.1 is self-contained apart from the prime number theorem and Mertens's theorem.
Earlier draft. A strict-order resolution of Erdős Problem #415 for
consecutive totients, a circulation draft dated 18 April 2026 (the first
preprint link), names no author on its title page and was posted by
Chojecki on 19 April 2026. Its Theorem 1.2 states the same asymptotic for
, taking the upper bound from Theorem 1.5 and
Remark 8.1 of Pollack, Pomerance and Treviño; its Corollary 1.3 and
Remark 4.3 say that it answers the first question, shows the monotone
patterns asymptotically extremal without identifying the first missing
pattern at a given , and leaves the third question to the weak-order
setting, where its Proposition 5.3 notes that realizing the equality pattern
infinitely often would settle Problem 1003. A reply on the thread the same
day reported that an automated check had found a mismatch between the
draft's Proposition 3.3 and its Theorem 1.2. The July post says only that
it closes some loose ends from the previous draft; neither the post nor the
July manuscript names that mismatch.
AI systems. The April post says the note was written with GPT-5.4 Pro. The July post says the problem and the GPT-5.4 Pro output were run through GPT-5.6 Sol, which produced the completion. The July manuscript's disclosure says that OpenAI's ChatGPT assisted with drafting, proof checking and typesetting. The site's commentary credits Chojecki and GPT-5.4 with sketching how the proof of Pollack, Pomerance and Treviño adapts to an arbitrary strict pattern.
Standing. Claimed. Neither manuscript is refereed or on arXiv, no outside reader is recorded as having reviewed the July manuscript, the site's proof-claims tab for the problem carries no entry, and the site's commentary credits the April sketch on a problem it labels OPEN, which is not acceptance. Proposition 1.2 rests on the finite computation printed in the manuscript's Appendix A; no proof in either manuscript has been independently reviewed. The reading of the three questions follows the manuscript's and is recorded in the Formulation on the problem page.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.