Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The answer to Problem 426 is no. Call a graph a unique subgraph of if contains exactly one subgraph isomorphic to , and let be the maximum over graphs on vertices of the number of non-isomorphic unique subgraphs of divided by , which is, up to a factor , the number of non-isomorphic graphs on vertices (Pólya; Wright). Theorem 1.2 of Bradač and Christoph states that as : no graph on vertices has a constant proportion of all -vertex graphs as unique subgraphs. This refutes the site's question as Erdős posed it (some with for all ), and it is exactly the negation of the weaker reading that formal-conjectures uses; the problem page's Formulation records both readings. The proof replaces the unlabeled count by the probability that a random graph embeds uniquely into , shows that a positive proportion forces to have only non-edges, and then shows that such an has a unique embedding of with probability , by switching two vertices of small non-degree. Erdős had offered prizes for a proof and for a disproof and expected the answer no. The known lower bounds remain exponentially small, the best being Brouwer's . The site's commentary and the thread's second comment report a quantitative rate from the paper's concluding remarks, not checked. The result is digested on the source card bradac_2024_unique_subgraphs_are_rare; this corpus has not reviewed the proof, and the claim consumes no page of this wiki.
Acceptance. Reviewed: the site's curator writes in the problem's commentary
that Bradač and Christoph proved the answer is no, with $f(n)=o(2^{\binom
n2}/n!)$; the proof-claim tab is empty. The site's label is DISPROVED (LEAN)
(site export of 2026-09-04); on 2026-10-07 the public page's markup showed no
label text, and the community database (teorth/erdosproblems,
data/problems.yaml as of 2026-09-28) records status "disproved (Lean)", which
its commit of 20 April 2026 set, with formal_status Lean. Refereed: D. Bradač
and M. Christoph, Unique subgraphs are rare, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 153 (2025),
no. 11, 4585-4593, doi:10.1090/proc/17303, published electronically 20 August
2025; the arXiv record (v1 of 21 October 2024, CC BY 4.0) carries no journal
reference. Not counted as formalized: a public Lean formalization exists, but
the corpus has not built it or audited its statement. Lorenzo Luccioli posted to
the problem's thread on 20 April 2026 a formalization of the paper's result
produced with Aristotle, and on 24 April 2026 a refined version carrying the
paper's quantitative rate for the normalized quantity fSeq; both gists are
linked above by their posting dates. The file in plby/lean-proofs, linked at its
commit of 1 August 2026, collects it and names Bradač and Christoph as informal
authors and Aristotle and Luccioli as formal authors (f_tendsto_zero : Tendsto fSeq atTop (nhds 0), with the file's own #print axioms comment listing
propext, Classical.choice and Quot.sound). The formal-conjectures file at
its pin, a statement file and so not linked above, states erdos_426 as
answer(False) under research solved with proof sorry and a formal_proof
attribute naming that file; its docstring reads the site's as a constant
working for arbitrarily large and identifies the negation with
. The corpus has built and checked none of these
files.