Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Tinius Alexander Lystad's proof claim of 2 August 2026 on the
proof-claims tab of Problem 263 gives
a Lean 4 and Mathlib proof of the folklore root criterion without
monotonicity: every sequence of positive integers with
has irrational. The proof sorts the
sequence, which keeps the sum and, by a counting lemma, the root condition,
and then applies his monotone theorem
(its page).
The development, generated with Kimi K3 under Lystad's direction, is in the
repository linked above and archived on Zenodo; the write-up
PROOF-1975.md covers only the monotone step, and the entry notes that the
analogue fails without monotonicity.
Submission note. Posted to erdosproblems.com as a proof claim by Tinius Alexander Lystad (account alexander_lystad) on 2 August 2026, giving "Kimi K3" as the AI used:
A Lean 4 + Mathlib proof, zero 'sorry', of the folklore growth criterion stated on this page: every sequence of positive integers with — no monotonicity assumption — has irrational. Idea: sort the sequence into non-decreasing order (the sum is unchanged); the root condition survives the rearrangement by a counting lemma (at most indices can host terms once for ); then our previously posted monotone-sequence theorem applies. We are aware of no prior proof of the no-monotonicity form; published proofs (Erdős 1975, Hančl 1993) assume increasing. Q1 remains open. Notes: Verification: 'lake exe cache get && lake build' in the linked repository completes (8666 jobs) with zero 'sorry' outside the declared open Q1 obligation; axioms '[propext, Classical.choice, Quot.sound]' only, checkable with '#print axioms erdos_263_one_sided_folklore_proof'. Sharpness: the limsup analogue is false — an interleaved-Sylvester construction has but rational sum (exact-arithmetic certificate 'code/limsup_counterexample.py' in the ai-math repo), so the hypothesis is load-bearing; the criterion itself appears verbatim ("not hard to show") in Erdős–Graham 1980, p. 63. The limsup counterexample carries an exact-arithmetic certificate ('code/limsup_counterexample.py' in the ai-math repo; construction and verification also sketched in PROOF-1975.md's repo). Archived release: v2.0, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21760479 Produced with AI assistance (Kimi K3) under a machine-verification gate
Why it is rejected. It does not address the Statement.
Problem 263 asks whether
is an irrationality sequence and whether every irrationality
sequence has . The claim addresses instead the folklore
root criterion without monotonicity: a sufficient condition for irrationality
that does not meet, since , and that says nothing about
whether growth is necessary. It decides neither question, so its mathematics
does not settle this problem. The value proved is its answer to that
criterion.
Standing. Rejected, as not addressing the Statement. The entry carries no
comments and no review; this corpus has neither read the repository nor built
the development, so it gives formalization links and no formalized
evidence.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.