Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Yong-Gao Chen and Imre Z. Ruzsa, On the irrationality of certain series, Period. Math. Hungar. 38 (1999), no. 1–2, 31–37. The site's remarks, the formal-conjectures docstring and the OEIS entry A371134 all credit this paper with the proof that
is irrational, the question of Problem 259, and the site adds that the paper proves the stronger conjecture Erdős made in 1988: every infinite subseries of this sum over squarefree is irrational. The third-party Lean gist below, which follows the paper, builds the proof from the paper's irrationality criterion for series (Lemma 1), a congruence lemma (Lemma 3: for a prime not dividing there is with divisible by ) and Theorem 4 ( is irrational for distinct each -free or squarefull), applied with and to the squarefree numbers. The library does not hold the paper's full text, so its exact theorem and its proof are recorded by these pointers; the library card holds the bibliographic record.
Acceptance. Refereed: Periodica Mathematica Hungarica, volume 38, issue
1–2, published in print in February 1999. Reviewed: Thomas Bloom, the site's
curator, labels the problem proved and credits the paper with the stronger
conjecture in the problem's remarks (page last edited 19 October 2025;
accessed 2026-10-07), and a comment in the site's thread of 2025-09-02
records that the constant's OEIS entry cites the paper as the positive
solution. The site's Lean qualifier refers to a Lean 4 gist by the GitHub
user ster-oc, posted to the thread on 2026-04-21 and made with Aristotle,
per that thread comment: the community database records the problem's Lean
status from that day, and formal-conjectures, which tags its statement
erdos_259 research solved, has cited the gist as its formal proof since
2026-04-27 (the revision of 2026-10-06 is the record link). The gist's
header says it proves the irrationality "using the Chen–Ruzsa irrationality
criterion", so it is recorded as a formalization of this result and not as
an independent proof. The second formalization link is the gist's port in
Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs repository
(src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos259.lean, added 2026-04-28), whose header
calls it a Lean formalization of a solution
to Problem 259, names Chen and Ruzsa as the informal authors and Aristotle
and Stefano Rocca as the formal authors, and lists the gist as its source.
This corpus has not built, replayed or audited either file, so the claim
carries no formalized evidence, and the corpus records no check of the
proof.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the claim is the cited paper's theorem.
The page name carries the month of print publication that Crossref records; Crossref gives no day.