Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Write , a maximum over the gaps whose left endpoint lies below , so that a gap counts even when its right endpoint lies beyond . For a fixed let be the assertion that
as , uniformly over ; the question of
Problem 1138 asks whether holds for
every , and this is the reading the paper, the site and the Lean
statement in google-deepmind/formal-conjectures take. Theorem 1.2 of the
paper: if and , then and cannot
both hold. Corollary 3.1: fails for some , so the answer to the
question is no.
The obstruction uses strict record gaps. Since prime gaps are unbounded, there are infinitely many indices whose gap exceeds every earlier gap. Put , and inside that gap, with above both and and chosen so that ; the record property gives , and the positions give for large . The intervals and share their right endpoint, and neither nor the gap below contains a prime, so both contain the same number of primes. If and both held, that common count would be asymptotic to and to at once; as , this forces , a contradiction. The site's remark records a shorter variant: with and for a record gap , the counts for and for any coincide.
The disproof settles the question as posed, for every at once. Whether fails for every single is open: the obstruction rules out two constants close together, and the site's discussion notes that a lattice of surviving constants with is not excluded (constants exactly apart are ruled out as well: at a record gap their counts differ by one prime while the predicted main terms differ by , which tends to infinity); the behavior when grows slowly with is also open. Neither is part of this claim.
Acceptance. The site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, marks Problem 1138
disproved and credits the result to Sunder, Kumrawat and Cheri together
with GPT 5.5, the reviewed evidence. The paper is H. Sunder, S. Kumrawat
and K. Cheri, An elementary obstruction to a uniform prime-gap asymptotic,
dated April 2026 and posted on the second author's page; it was announced in
the site's discussion on 25 April 2026, the date of this page. In that
announcement the authors state that GPT-5.5 Pro and GPT-5.5 Thinking were
used in developing and checking the argument; the paper itself names no AI
system. The three human authors are the claimants here, with the system
named as they name it. No journal publication is recorded, so no
refereed evidence is listed.
Formalization. Three Lean developments formalize the disproof, each
following the paper, so they are links on this page and not claims of their
own. The first, posted in the site's discussion on 4 May 2026 by Lorenzo
Luccioli and generated with Aristotle (Harmonic), pinned at the gist
revision in the link, proves Theorem 1.2 and Corollary 3.1 for its own
definitions. The second, 1138a.lean in Yan Yablonovskiy's fork of
formal-conjectures, pinned at the commit of 22 June 2026, reuses the
definitions of the formal-conjectures statement and proves
erdos1138_corollary: the per- asymptotic, taken along the filter of
with , cannot hold for every , with and
as the contradicting pair; the formal_proof attribute of the
statement in google-deepmind/formal-conjectures names this file, and its
504 lines contain no sorry, axiom or native_decide token. The third,
Erdos1138.lean in Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs repository, added there on
6 May 2026 and pinned at its last change, of 25 August 2026, is a modified
copy of the first; its header names Sunder, Kumrawat and Cheri as informal
authors and Aristotle and Lorenzo Luccioli as formal authors and marks it
unconditional. This corpus has built none of them, so no formalized
evidence is listed, and the formal-conjectures statement file is not a
formalization link.
Depends on. Nothing beyond the cited paper.