Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For every Sidon set (all sums with
distinct up to the order of the summands) there is a set
of cardinality with
, and the same holds for every
with . Restricted to sum-free , these
are instances of Problem 949 answered
yes. The proof is the theorem erdos_949.variants.sidon of the
formal-conjectures statement file for the problem, merged on 6 January 2026
from the pull request linked above, whose description says that AlphaProof
found several proofs of the variant and that the author of the pull request
cleaned one up, keeping AlphaProof's version in the pull request's history. A
comment in the site's discussion thread on 7 January 2026, by the same
author, gives the argument in prose and links the Lean proof. The argument
has two cases. If , Zorn's lemma gives a maximal
with ;
maximality puts every real outside into
, a set of cardinality at most , so
. This case does not use the Sidon hypothesis. If
, pick with and set
; the Sidon property leaves at most one
point of inside , so , and
is disjoint from .
The variant as formalized asks the question for every Sidon , sum-free or
not; the theorem is stated for IsSidon S and proved without sorry inside
the statement file.
Submission note. Posted to the site's forum by Yaël Dillies on 7 January 2026:
For the question from the additional material: “Erdős suggests that if the answer is no, one could consider the variant where we assume that is Sidon.” AlphaProof found the following solution:
We case on whether has cardinality the continuum or strictly less. If has cardinality strictly less than the continuum, then we pick by Zorn some maximal such that both and are disjoint from . Now, to see has size the continuum, note that
by maximality of . By assumption, . If , we would therefore have
contradiction. If has cardinality the continuum, then we pick some $a\ne 0$ in and set . Since is Sidon and ,
has at most one element. In particular, $|A| = |S \setminus {a} - a / 2| = |S| = |\mathbb R|$ as wanted. Since is Sidon,
is disjoint from , as wanted.
Here is the Lean proof discovered by AlphaProof as well as a cleaned up version.
(The site has been updated to address this comment.)
Covers. Every sum-free Sidon , and every sum-free with : for these the answer is yes. Not covered: sum-free of cardinality that are not Sidon, which is where the problem stays open.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.
Acceptance. None recorded. The site labels the problem OPEN; its
commentary states that a thread comment proves the Sidon variant by an
argument that AlphaProof found, which is commentary on an open problem and not
an acceptance of a solution. The proof is attributed to AlphaProof, as the
pull request and the comment name it. This corpus has not built the file at
the linked commit or audited the theorem's statement, so the link is not
formalized evidence; nothing on this page is this project's own review. No
refereed source carries the result.