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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. There is an absolute constant CC such that every positive integer nn has at most CC representations n=2a+3b+2c3dn=2^a+3^b+2^c3^d with integers a,b,c,d≥0a,b,c,d\ge0. So w(n)w(n) is bounded, and the question of Problem 407, Newman's conjecture, has an affirmative answer. The result is Theorem 6(a) of J.-H. Evertse, K. Győry, C. L. Stewart and R. Tijdeman, SS-unit equations and their applications, in A. Baker (ed.), New Advances in Transcendence Theory (Durham, 1986), Cambridge University Press, 1988, 110--174, published 1988-10-13 by the publisher's record. The paper is not held by this corpus. The theorem number and the attribution come from the introduction of Tijdeman and Wang's paper (card), which says that Theorem 6(a) settled Newman's conjecture; the introduction of Bajpai and Bennett's paper (card) also credits this paper with settling the conjecture, without a theorem number, and describes the argument as ineffective: it rests on the finiteness theorem for nondegenerate solutions of SS-unit equations and gives no computable value of CC. The Lean development below describes the paper's reduction as one from Newman's conjecture to the finiteness of nondegenerate {2,3}\{2,3\}-unit equations in at most six terms.

Later work. Two results settle the problem again with quantitative bounds, each on its own page: Tijdeman and Wang prove that every large nn has at most four representations once representations with the same three summands are identified (their paper, received in October 1986 and printed in March 1988, already cites this Durham 1986 chapter as having settled the conjecture, so the chapter precedes it although it was printed later), and Bajpai and Bennett make the bound effective, with at most nine such representations for every nn. The uniform bound of Evertse, Schlickewei and Schmidt on the number of nondegenerate solutions of a linear equation in a multiplicative group of finite rank also bounds w(n)w(n), as the corpus's card of that paper records; it is not a claim about this problem by its authors.

Acceptance. The site's curator, T. F. Bloom, labels the problem proved and credits this paper with the proof; that documented acceptance is the reviewed evidence. The paper appears in an edited proceedings volume, and whether its chapters were refereed is not recorded here, so refereed is not listed. Nothing of the proof was checked by this project.

Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos407.lean of Boris Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs (Lean and Mathlib v4.33.0; 267 lines at the pinned commit of 2026-09-15) declares itself a formalization of a solution of Problem 407, naming as informal authors Evertse, Győry, Stewart and Tijdeman, Evertse, Schlickewei and Schmidt, and Bajpai and Bennett, and as formal authors the AI systems Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol. Its theorem erdos_407 states that the number of ordered quadruples (a,b,c,d)(a,b,c,d) with n=2a+3b+2c3dn=2^a+3^b+2^c3^d is bounded independently of nn, the literal counting convention of the problem. The file's commentary says the unconditional proof goes through a specialized rational three-place Subspace Theorem proved inside the development, a bridge to the finiteness of bounded-arity {2,3}\{2,3\}-unit equations, and this paper's partition argument; two further theorems derive the same conclusion from the Bajpai--Bennett bound and from the Evertse--Schlickewei--Schmidt bound taken as hypotheses. The formal-conjectures statement erdos_407 (file added 2026-09-20) is tagged research solved and carries a formal_proof link to this file. Nothing was built, replayed or audited here, so formalized is not listed.