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Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.

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Claim. There is a 22-coloring of R\mathbb R such that for every k≥2k\ge2 no set X⊆RX\subseteq\mathbb R with ∣X∣=c|X|=\mathfrak c has FSk(X)FS_k(X), the set of sums of kk distinct elements of XX, monochromatic. The coloring fixes a Hamel basis ⟨ei⟩i∈R\langle e_i\rangle_{i\in\mathbb R} of R\mathbb R over Q\mathbb Q and a well-ordering WW of R\mathbb R of order type c\mathfrak c, and colors xx by the parity of the position, among the support indices of xx in increasing order, of the WW-largest one. This is Theorem 3.2 of the paper, paged at Theorem 3.2 of the library's source card. With k=2k=2 it says that no set of size c\mathfrak c has the sums of its distinct pairs in one color.

Hypothesis. The theorem itself is a theorem of ZFC, but it concerns sets of size c\mathfrak c, while Problem 965 asks about sets of size ℵ1\aleph_1. Under the continuum hypothesis ℵ1=c\aleph_1=\mathfrak c, and the case k=2k=2 is the negative answer to the problem; this is how the paper presents the result, saying that its proof relies on CH and that without CH it asserts only that there is no such set of size c\mathfrak c. The authors add (p. 11 of the preprint) that if c>ω1\mathfrak c>\omega_1 their coloring does admit a set of size ω1\omega_1 with FSkFS_k monochromatic for every k≥2k\ge2, and ask (Question 3.3) whether ZFC alone gives a finite coloring with no uncountable set whose pair sums are monochromatic. That question is answered by the accepted ZFC claims Komjáth 2016 and Soukup and Weiss 2015, which reach the conclusion without CH; CH itself is independent of ZFC, and this claim remains conditional on it.

Acceptance. Refereed: N. Hindman, I. Leader and D. Strauss, Pairwise sums in colourings of the reals, Abh. Math. Semin. Univ. Hambg. 87 (2017), no. 2, 275--287, published online 21 December 2016 (the publisher's record), following the preprint arXiv:1505.02500 of 11 May 2015, the date this page is named by. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, credits the paper as the published proof of the disproof under the continuum hypothesis, in the stronger kk-fold form, in the problem's commentary (page last edited 16 January 2026, accessed 2026-09-18). Semantic Scholar's four citing records, include by title no dispute.

Read depth. The basis is arXiv v1, the only arXiv version; the journal text was not compared. Theorem 3.2 (p. 9), the remark and Question 3.3 (p. 11) were checked clause by clause; the proof (pp. 9--11) was read for its structure only, and nothing is independently reviewed in this corpus.