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 927 is no: , the largest number of different sizes of cliques (maximal complete subgraphs) in a graph on vertices, is not . The claimed result is the main bound of J. H. Spencer, On cliques in graphs, Israel J. Math. 9 (1971), no. 4, 419--421 (p. 419, logarithms to the base ): for every , . The paper reprints Erdős's question, printed as whether ; since Moon and Moser's upper bound keeps below , the divergence in question is that of , and the paper answers it negatively by an explicit graph in the style of Moon and Moser and of Erdős's 1966 construction, with blocks of sizes whose unions realize a clique of every size from to about , padded in two further cases to cover every between consecutive block counts. The refutation is one line: if for all large , then Spencer's bound gives for every , which fails since . With Moon and Moser's upper bound for (their claim page) the result is , the estimate the site records. The constant is the paper's headline as printed; by the construction's own counts the third of its three cases, the window , realizes only clique sizes, so the counts give for , with outside that window; the disproof needs only a fixed constant.
Acceptance. Refereed: Israel Journal of Mathematics (Crossref record accessed: volume 9, issue 4, pp. 419--421, issued February 1971; the day is the issue's nominal first day, used for this page's date). Reviewed: Erdős himself attests the result in the note added in proof to item 10 of his 1971 problem list (item_10, printed p. 101), and the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem disproved and credits the paper with . The source has a library source card. Read depth: the definitions, the question and the main bound clause by clause, and the construction in full with its vertex counts followed; its clique checks are not checked, and the closing bounds use a bracket the paper leaves undefined, a filing observation that does not touch the disproof. The acceptance rests on the publication, Erdős's attestation and the site's acceptance; nothing is independently reviewed by this project.
Formalization. The file Erdos927.lean (93,655 bytes, 2,130 lines) of a
GitHub gist at its only revision, committed 2026-06-05 (the formalization
link above), declares itself a formalization of Spencer's disproof: its
header names John Jennings and the automated formalization system Aristotle
(Harmonic) as authors, and its docstring cites the paper and its headline
bound. The account JohnJennings announced it on the problem's discussion
thread the same day, saying that Aristotle had formalized Spencer's disproof
in Lean 4, with a link to a Lean web editor page loading the gist against
Mathlib v4.28.0. The file defines g n as the largest number of
maximal-clique sizes over graphs on Fin n and logStar as the
iterated-logarithm count with the site's threshold; encodes the conjecture as
erdos927_conjecture : ∃ C : ℕ, ∀ n : ℕ, n ≥ 2 → g n + Nat.log 2 n + logStar n ≤ n + C,
the upper half of the problem's formula,
, whose negation is what the
disproof needs; builds a graph spGraph n on spN n vertices and proves
spencer_lower_bound : spN n ≤ g (spN n) + Nat.log 2 (spN n) + 6 for
n ≥ 16, the constant along a sequence of where the paper has
for every ; and ends with
theorem erdos927_disproof : ¬ erdos927_conjecture. It imports Mathlib,
has no sorry and no axiom, and uses
native_decide five times, which puts the compiled evaluator inside what
the proof trusts. Two further copies are linked above: the file
src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos927.lean of Boris Alexeev's repository
plby/lean-proofs (in the repository since 2026-08-26, linked at the commit
of 15 September 2026), whose header names Spencer's paper as the informal
proof and John Jennings and Aristotle (Harmonic) as the formal authors,
says that Jake Mallen replaced the native evaluation with kernel-checked
proofs, and cites the gist and the copy in the repository Jayyhk/erdos-lean
(linked at its commit of 25 August 2026); the lean-proofs file proves
not_erdos_927, that no constant bounds
from above for all large , and
records the axioms propext, Classical.choice and Quot.sound in a
comment. All three are self-declared formalizations of Spencer's disproof;
the formal-conjectures statement erdos_927 names the lean-proofs file in
its formal_proof attribute (the problem page records that file). This
project has not built, replayed or audited any of them, so the page lists no
formalized evidence. The disproof rests on the refereed paper, not on
these files.