Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
The claim. Let be integers with for all . Then , with equality only for , , ; this answers the first question of Problem 542 yes. For every and all some such set has , and the sets built on pp. 228--229, which contain no (as the question needs: satisfies the hypothesis and leaves no such integer), leave only integers divisible by no element; since under the hypothesis the multiples of distinct elements up to are disjoint, exactly integers up to are divisible by no element, so no constant gives such integers for every admissible set, which answers no the second question of the problem's corrected Statement, which counts the integers divisible by no element of a set without . The site's wording ("do not divide any ") has the answer no for a trivial reason that this paper does not supply; the problem page's Notes record it. The source is A. Schinzel and G. Szekeres, Sur un problème de M. Paul Erdős, Acta Sci. Math. (Szeged) 20 (1959), 221--229, received 17 January 1959 (p. 229; the date this page is named by), paged as Theorem 1, Theorem 3 and the construction of pp. 228--229 of Schinzel and Szekeres (1959). The same paper's Theorem 2, for large with , is a refinement and not part of this claim. The proof of Theorem 1 bounds the reciprocal sum by a weighted count over the disjoint multiple sets (Lemma 1) with explicit weights whose bound falls below except at eight values of , checked by hand (Lemma 2, pp. 222--228); Theorem 3 is proved by the construction. Condition (1), the three theorems and the construction with its bound were checked clause by clause; Lemmas 1 and 2 and the proof of Theorem 3 were read for structure, and the finite verification behind Lemma 2 was not rerun.
Acceptance. Refereed: Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum (Szeged) is a
refereed journal, and the paper is dated received on its last page.
Reviewed: Erdős's 1973 survey (p. 135) records that Schinzel and Szekeres
proved his conjecture and disproved his expectation of
integers, and his 1980 survey (p. 111) records the disproof again; the
site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem SOLVED and credits both
answers to this paper, with the count and the sums above
(page last edited 8 April 2026; three thread comments and an
empty proof-claim tab on 2026-09-18 and on 2026-10-07). The paper itself
proves (p. 229); the power-of-log count is the site's and Erdős's
1980 report, which prints no source. Nothing here is independently reviewed
by this project. The claim value is answered because the result has neither
the shape of a proof nor that of a disproof alone: it proves the first
question and refutes the second.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos542.lean of
Boris Alexeev's public repository plby/lean-proofs, added on 17 August
2026 and linked above at the repository head of 15 September 2026,
declares itself a Lean formalization of a solution to the problem, names
Schinzel and Szekeres as its informal authors and two AI systems, Codex and
GPT-5.6 Sol, as its formal authors, at Lean and Mathlib v4.33.0. Its
closing theorem erdos_542 asserts six conjuncts: the bound for
every and every admissible set; that is admissible for
with reciprocal sum ; that a construction family is
admissible; that along it the proportion of integers up to divisible
by no element tends to ; that its reciprocal sums eventually exceed
; and that no gives such integers for all
admissible sets, all in the "divisible by no element" reading. The
formal-conjectures statement file for the problem, added on 20 September
2026 and recorded on the problem page, names line 2114 of this file in the
formal_proof attributes of its two parts and two of its variants; a
statement file, it is not linked here. The file contains no sorry and no
axiom. It was neither built nor audited in this corpus, so formalized
is not listed and no kernel credit is claimed; the site does not label the
problem Lean, and its proof-claim tab was empty on 2026-09-18 and on
2026-10-07.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki: the theorems are proved within the paper, whose card is linked above.