Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Every graph with maximum degree at most has an equitable -coloring, which by complementation (written on the problem page) is the statement of Problem 914: every graph with vertices and minimum degree at least contains vertex-disjoint copies of . The claimed result is H. A. Kierstead and A. V. Kostochka, A short proof of the Hajnal--Szemerédi theorem on equitable colouring, Combin. Probab. Comput. 17 (2008), no. 2, 265--270, DOI 10.1017/S0963548307008619 (issued March 2008 by its Crossref record, the nominal first day of which is this page's date). The paper is not held. Its statement is known through the site, through the 2010 paper of the same authors with Mydlarz and Szemerédi (card), and through the external Lean file for the problem, whose header says that it formalizes this proof. The paper is a second proof of the theorem first proved by Hajnal and Szemerédi, whose result it does not consume.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the paper's argument is self-contained, and the elementary transfer to the clique form is written on the problem page.
Acceptance. Refereed publication in Combinatorics, Probability and
Computing, cited with its venue above, the refereed evidence. The
reviewed evidence is the documented acceptance of the site's curator
(T. F. Bloom), independent of the authors: the commentary names the paper as
a shorter proof of the theorem, and the forum comment of 13 March 2026
pointing to it is marked by the site as addressed. The text is not held, so
no proof step is checked.
Formalization. The file src/v4.29.1/ErdosProblems/Erdos914.lean of
Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs, linked above at the repository's head
of 15 September 2026, declares itself a Lean formalization of this paper's
proof, naming Kierstead and Kostochka as its informal authors and, as formal
authors, the AI system Aristotle and Wouter van Doorn, who announced it in the
site's thread on 15 April 2026 (the account Woett) as the work of Aristotle
over many hundreds of hours, with a link to type-check it online; the header
also names a file ErdosProblem914.lean in the repository Woett/Lean-files
as its first home. The file (Lean and Mathlib v4.29.1, 4,225 lines) proves
hajnal_szemeredi (line 4146), an equitable -coloring of every finite
simple graph of maximum degree at most , and
hajnal_szemeredi_clique_cover (line 4176): for , a graph on
vertices with minimum degree at least has pairwise disjoint
-cliques, the problem's statement with in place of and no
hypothesis on , both wider. It ends with
#print axioms hajnal_szemeredi_clique_cover and a comment recording
propext, Classical.choice and Quot.sound. This project has not built,
replayed or audited the file, so the page lists no formalized evidence; the
site's suffix "(LEAN)" and the community database's "proved (Lean)", listed as
of its last update of 14 April 2026, are catalog labels. The
formal-conjectures statement file for the problem names this proof in its
formal_proof attribute; it is a statement, not a formalization, and is
described on the problem page.