Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Larsen proves that for every there is an integer such
that every integer with and no prime factor
below is a sum of distinct proper divisors of itself (the paper's Theorem
1), and deduces an absolute constant such that every positive integer
with is such a sum (its Corollary 5). The deduction
fixes , passes to the part of free of primes below
, and notes that if is not such a sum then is at most
, a bounded quantity; a multiple of a
pseudoperfect number is pseudoperfect. The corollary is the problem's statement,
so the answer is yes. The proof recasts the question as writing as a sum
of reciprocals of divisors of , groups the prime factors of into
dyadic blocks, approaches greedily with controlled slack, and closes the
gap with a circle-method count of subset sums of reciprocals. The site's
commentary records that is necessary, since is abundant and not
such a sum. The manuscript, its versions and its statements are described
on the source card
Larsen 2026.
The first link is the eight-page manuscript uploaded to the Erdos-825
repository on 2026-01-31; the repository's commit of 2026-02-01 added only
its TeX source, with typo fixes. The second link is
the nine-page version in the Erdos-318 repository, which also carries the
squares result for Problem 318; it replaced on 2026-02-01 a first upload of
2026-01-31 that presented Theorem 6 tentatively and left its check of
Hypothesis 3 undone, and the replacement rewrites the proof of Theorem 6,
fixes typos and states the range of in the proof of Theorem 1.
Formalization. The third link is a Lean 4 proof of the argument whose
theorem erdos_825 states that there is a real such that every natural
number with equals the sum of some set of its proper
divisors; the statement is the one the formal-conjectures project wrote for the
problem in its
statement file,
with Mathlib's ArithmeticFunction.sigma 1 and the divisor set
Nat.properDivisors. The file's header declares it a
formalization of a solution to the problem, names Larsen as the author of the
informal proof, the formal-conjectures authors as the authors of the statement,
and OpenAI's Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as the formal authors; it builds against
Lean 4.33.0 and Mathlib v4.33.0, runs to 5,911 lines, and follows Larsen's
argument through a rough-number reduction, a controlled greedy construction and
a weighted unit-fraction circle method, importing the repository's
Fourier-analytic unit-fraction modules. The commit adding the file is dated
2026-08-15 by its author and 2026-08-16 by its committer; the link carries the
author date. The pinned file contains no sorry, axiom or native_decide;
this corpus has not built or audited it, so its axiom closure is unverified
and formalized is not listed as evidence.
Acceptance. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, affirmed the
argument on the discussion thread on 2026-01-31, noting that it also answers
Erdős's further question of using only divisors at most , and
the problem page records the problem solved in the affirmative by Larsen
(last edited 2026-02-01); the community database records the informal status
proved as of 2026-01-31. No refereed version of the manuscript is recorded.
Both versions of the manuscript, the eight-page file and the nine-page file,
close with the sentence "We acknowledge the assistance of Claude Opus 4.5 and
ChatGPT 5.2 Pro for proofreading." After the formalization, the site labels
the problem PROVED (LEAN) (page last edited 1 February 2026), the community
database records the formal status Lean as of 2026-08-23, and the
formal-conjectures statement file, at the commit linked above, marks
erdos_825 research solved with its formal-proof attribute pointing at the
pinned Lean file. The problem page is
Problem 825.