Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Both questions of Problem 673 are answered yes. P. Erdős and G. Tenenbaum, Sur les diviseurs consécutifs d'un entier, Bull. Soc. Math. France 111 (1983), 125--145, prove (Théorème 2, p. 126) that for every of class
with this is , and Théorème 3 (p. 127) refines it to with . On p. 127 they note that if is the least prime factor of , then , so , for at least indices . Hence , and the integers with have density . Since for almost all , for almost all . Their Théorème 1 says that has a limiting distribution; it is the result announced in the note to Erdős's 1982 survey.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.
Acceptance. Refereed and formalized. Refereed: the paper appeared in the
Bulletin de la Société Mathématique de France. Formalized: this corpus's
verification built Boris Alexeev's repository of formalized Erdős problems at
its pinned commit of 2026-09-15, linked above, in its src/latest folder (Lean
v4.33.0, Mathlib v4.33.0), whose module ErdosProblems/Erdos673.lean, with
its companion ErdosProblems/Erdos673/Mean.lean, is the development added on
2026-08-17, unchanged since except for a header added on 2026-08-23, and checked
the axioms of Erdos673.erdos_673, which are exactly propext,
Classical.choice and Quot.sound. The repository's comparator challenge
ComparatorChallenges/ErdosProblems/Erdos673.lean pins that declaration
together with the definitions its type reaches (the increasing enumeration of
the divisors, , its summatory function, natural density, and tending to
infinity on a set of density ), and the fingerprint of the compared
declaration was found identical to the challenge. The statement was audited
clause by clause: its second conjunct, that
as , states the paper's mean value exactly to its leading term, with
no error term; sums over the increasing divisor enumeration,
its only junk value is harmless, and a natural loses nothing. Its
third conjunct is the corollary that the average of over tends to
infinity, and its first conjunct proves that for every real the integers
with have natural density , the divergence for almost all . The
solution's definitions and theorem match the challenge verbatim, and its local
import closure contains no sorry and no axiom. The build certifies these
statements, not the paper's argument: the development proves them by its own
route, described below, and gives no error term, so Théorèmes 1 and 3 and the
error term of Théorème 2 rest on the refereed paper alone. Not reviewed: the
site's page does not cite the paper, so no curator review is listed. Tenenbaum's
2013 survey
(source card)
restates the mean value. Combining Théorème 3 with Ford's estimate for
, it sharpens the result to
.
Formalization. Boris Alexeev's repository of formalized Erdős problems
holds a Lean development, added on 2026-08-17; its module and its index page
of 2026-08-22 are linked above at the commit built. Its header names Erdős and
Tenenbaum as informal authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors.
G_tendsToInfinityAlmostAll proves the divergence through
tao_lower_bound, Tao's bound with . GSum_isEquivalent proves
by bounding the deficit
by , a different route from the
paper's. G_average_tendsto_atTop proves that the average tends to infinity,
and erdos_673 bundles all three. The formal-conjectures repository's
statement file for the problem,
as amended on 2026-09-22, states the asymptotic formula as
erdos_673.parts.ii, tagged research solved, with a formal_proof
attribute pointing to this development at a pinned commit, and the pull
request that added the file
(#6383,
merged 2026-09-20) records that its author rebuilt the development's closure
against that repository's Mathlib, with #print axioms reporting only
propext, Classical.choice and Quot.sound, and compiled a bridge from
the development's definition of to the file's own statements; the
amendment of 2026-09-22 added the hypothesis to the file's statement of
Tao's bound. A statement file is not a proof; the formalized evidence rests
on this corpus's own build of the development.