Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For a practical number let be the least number of distinct divisors of that always suffice to write every positive integer below as a sum. The second question of Problem 18 has the answer yes: for every there is with
that is, . The proof is a Lean file of 14,043 lines with no
import statement, submitted under the handle JenW1N to the bounty site
Conjectures.io, which had published the problem's second question as the
formal-conjectures declaration Erdos18.erdos_18b with its answer marker
left to be filled. The file fills the marker as True, pins the target type
by rfl, and closes the target by deriving the bound from a Fourier-decay
property of product measures built from sets of odd integers on the cyclic
groups , which it proves in the same file; the reduction and
the formal statement are recorded on
the target page of its card.
No write-up accompanies the proof, and the file names no author and declares
no AI system.
Submission note. Posted to erdosproblems.com as a proof claim by conjectures.io (account TFBloom) on 27 September 2026, giving "Unknown" as the AI used:
This formalisation claims a proof that . Notes: This was posted on conjectures.io. I have not verified the proof yet, and do not claim that the formalisation is correct, nor have I looked into the proof at all. I am posting this here so that others are aware that this claim has been made, and we can discuss it here. This should also not be read as any kind of endorsement of the conjectures.io program - in my view it is using these problems, which it does not care about, for its own ends, without making any attempts to explain these proofs or engage with the mathematical community. It is also not transparent (e.g. of who is running these through the AI, how long for, and which AI).
Covers. The second question only, . The formal statement
quantifies over every real and all sufficiently large ,
with the catalog's practicalH as under the fresh-set reading (a new set
of divisors may be chosen for each target). It says nothing about the first
question, general practical with , or the
third, .
Depends on. No page of this wiki.
Acceptance. The reviewed evidence is the certification by Conjectures.io:
its Lean kernel verified the proof with the axioms
propext, Quot.sound and Classical.choice permitted and no second kernel
run; its review approved the record the same day under its policy v3, through
two independent agent assessments of one model family, without a fresh Lean
replay; the record was certified on 17 September 2026 and its bounty paid.
Conjectures.io's check that the proof's source type matches the catalog's
declaration, and the comparison of the target with the catalog file, are on
the card.
Beyond the bounty site there is no acceptance: no refereed publication exists,
and erdosproblems.com shows the problem open. Its curator, Thomas Bloom, posted
the record on the problem's proof-claims tab on 27 September 2026 (third link)
as a partial proof Bloom had not verified, so that posting discloses the result
and reviews nothing. This corpus has not built the file, so no formalized
evidence is listed.