Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Desmond Weisenberg, in a post of 17 August 2025 in the discussion thread of Problem 949, claims the answer no to the erdosproblems.com wording of that time, which asked for a set of cardinality continuum with . The counterexample is , which is sum-free; every that is not a multiple of has a multiple in , so the subsets of closed under addition are sub-semigroups of , all countable. A later edit of the post says that the corrected problem asks for , which the construction does not resolve.
Submission note. Posted to the erdosproblems.com forum by Desmond Weisenberg (account DesmondWeisenberg) on 17 August 2025:
The answer is no. Let be the set of all intervals of the form $[3n+1, 3n
- 2)$, with . Then is sum-free. Furthermore, if $a \in \mathbb{R}\backslash S$ and is not a multiple of , then has a multiple in . As such, the only subsets of that are closed under addition are the sub-semigroups of , so certainly has no uncountable subsets that are closed under addition.
The website mentions the variant where we instead require that is Sidon. That's probably a lot harder, and my construction is very much not Sidon.
EDIT: Vjeko pointed out that the problem should actually ask about such that , not . So my construction actually doesn't resolve the corrected problem.
Why it is rejected. It answers a variant, not the Statement. The
construction answers erdosproblems.com's earlier wording, which asked for
closed under addition. Problem 949 asks,
as Erdős did and as the erdosproblems.com wording corrected on 17 and 18 August
2025 does, for of cardinality continuum with
, and its Formulation sets the earlier wording
aside. For the construction's that question has the answer yes, with
, so the counterexample settles no instance of it; its mathematics
answers the variant and does not settle this problem. The value disproved is
its answer to that variant.
Standing. Rejected, as answering a variant. The thread's next comment pointed out the mismatch with Erdős's wording and gave a set that works for this , and the author replied that no counterexample to the corrected formulation was at hand. This corpus has not checked the construction beyond what the problem page records.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.