Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. H. G. Eggleston, Covering a three-dimensional set with sets of smaller diameter, J. London Math. Soc. 30 (1955), 11–24. The paper proves Borsuk's assertion in dimension three: every bounded set of diameter in is the union of at most four sets of diameter . This is the instance of the question, answered yes. The instance is elementary, the plane case is Borsuk's own, and the question is answered no in general by the full claims recorded on this problem's other pages. The page is dated to the publication year, the record giving no day.
Covers. The instance of the question. The site's commentary
records the dimension-three result with this paper as its source, and the
formal-conjectures statement file for the problem, at its commit of
2026-10-07
(505.lean),
states the assertion for as a solved variant (erdos_505.small_dim),
crediting Borsuk for and Eggleston for , with no formal proof
attached; that file is a statement and not a formalization link. The file it
points to,
BorsukConjecture.lean,
states the case as borsuk_conjecture.three and credits it jointly to
Perkal (Colloq. Math. 2 (1947), 45) and to this paper; Kalai's survey
(arXiv:1505.04952) credits Eggleston with the first proof for dimension
three, and the problem page records why Perkal's note has no claim page. The
second file attaches as its formal proof the Lean development linked above,
in a fork of that repository, whose proof file names the result as
Eggleston's and proves it by the Gale--Grünbaum--Heppes cover method rather
than by Eggleston's argument; this corpus has not built it, so it gives no
formalized evidence here. The least dimension in which the assertion fails
is not part of the site's question; the dimensions to are settled by
no source recorded here.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.
Acceptance. The result is refereed: the Journal of the London Mathematical Society published the paper. The site's label, DISPROVED (LEAN), credits Kahn and Kalai and Jenrich and Brouwer with the disproof, so the curator's mention of Eggleston is context and not acceptance evidence for this partial claim.