Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Call a set of positive integers free of forbidden triples when it has no with and , with allowed, which is the site's reading of the condition and Bedert's Definition 1. Bedert proves that there is an absolute constant such that every such has (Theorem 1), and that for all sufficiently large such a set has , which the set attains (Theorem 2). Theorem 1 answers the problem's question yes; Theorem 2 gives the exact maximum for large . The source is B. Bedert, On a problem of Erdős and Sárközy about sequences with no term dividing the sum of two larger terms, arXiv:2301.07065v1 (17 January 2023), 43 pp., with the library pages Theorem 1 and Theorem 2 on the source card.
Acceptance. The claim is accepted on the review of Thomas Bloom, the
site's curator, who is independent of the claimant: the problem page,
labeled PROVED (LEAN) and last edited 8 April 2026, names Bedert's paper
in its commentary as the proof that the answer is yes (accessed
2026-09-18); its discussion thread and proof-claim tab were empty. The
formal-conjectures collection marks its statement of the problem
research solved. No journal version was found on 2026-09-18
(the arXiv record lists none, a Crossref bibliographic query returned no
record, and zbMATH Open lists the preprint only), no citing paper was found
through Semantic Scholar, and no dispute was found. The proof (pp. 3--43)
was not read in this repository, and this page rests on no review of its
own.
Formalization. One Lean file is linked: Erdos13.lean of Boris
Alexeev's collection lean-proofs at the pinned commit, which describes
itself as a Lean formalization of a solution to the problem, names Bedert
as the informal author and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as the formal authors, and
proves the statement from an internal bound, with no sorry,
axiom declaration or native_decide in its text. It was not built or
audited here, so it is linked and not counted as formalized.
The formal-conjectures file that states the theorem with a sorry body is
described on the problem page; a statement file is not a formalization and
is not linked here. The site's (LEAN) suffix is its catalog label; the
community database lists formal_status as Lean, as of a last update dated
23 August 2026, and has no field for a formal proof's location. On
18 September 2026 formal-conjectures registered the linked Erdos13.lean
as the formal_proof of its statement of the problem.
Scope. Full for the site's statement. Erdős's own finite conjecture, which forbids a term dividing the sum of two distinct larger terms and puts the maximum at , is a variant that the theorems as stated do not decide, and the -fold generalization is open; the problem page describes both.
Depends on. Theorem 1 of Bedert 2023 and Theorem 2, the result pages of the cited preprint.