Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. There is an absolute constant such that every positive integer has at most representations with integers . So 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, -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 -unit equations and gives no computable value of . The Lean development below describes the paper's reduction as one from Newman's conjecture to the finiteness of nondegenerate -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 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 . 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 , 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
with is bounded independently of , 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 -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.