Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. There are a set of cardinality and a coloring such that no product of three countably infinite subsets of is monochromatic. Since any three sets of cardinality can be identified with , the answer to Problem 1128 is no. In the polarized partition notation of the Erdős–Hajnal list, whose Problem 28 asks for the positive relation,
Komjáth's survey records beside it the positive square-bracket relation of Mills and Prikry for three colors, that every -coloring of such a cube has a countable box missing a color, and notes that the forcing of Shelah's paper Was Sierpiński right? I (Israel J. Math. 62 (1988), 355--380) gives the consistency, with , of the -color relation for cubes of size : every coloring of with colors has a monochromatic countable box. Neither bears on the two-color question for cubes of size .
Source. The result is unpublished. Komjáth's survey cites it as C. Mills
and K. Prikry, Some recent results about partitions of ,
unpublished, and the site dates it to 1978; the year is the only date
recorded, so this page's date is the first day of that year. Its two
published reports are the record links: S. Todorčević, Some partitions of
three-dimensional combinatorial cubes, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 68 (1994),
no. 2, 410--437, doi:10.1016/0097-3165(94)90113-9, not held by this corpus
(the problem page's reference prints no volume; the
publisher's record gives volume 68 and the issue month November 1994); and
P. Komjáth, The Erdős–Hajnal problem list, Bull. Symb. Log. 31 (2025),
418--461, on the corpus's
source card,
whose Problem 28 and its commentary are the basis of this page. Erdős's
Scottish Book account [Er81b] poses the question.
No proof text of the result is held by this corpus, and nothing on this
page is independently reviewed by this project.
Acceptance. Reviewed: the curator of erdosproblems.com, T. F. Bloom,
labels Problem 1128 disproved and credits Prikry and Mills, naming the
reports of Todorčević and Komjáth (problem page last edited 30 December
2025, accessed 2026-10-07); Komjáth's refereed survey independently records
the result as theirs. The curator and Komjáth are independent of the
authors. There is no refereed publication of the result by its authors, so
refereed is not listed: the two reports are refereed publications that
record the result, not publications of its proof.
Formalization. A Lean proof of the result is the formalization
link: the file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos1128.lean in Boris Alexeev's
lean-proofs repository, linked at its commit of 2026-08-31. Its header
calls it a Lean formalization of a solution to the problem, names Karel
Prikry and George Mills as the informal authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol
as the formal authors, and takes the statement from the formal-conjectures
file. Its theorem not_erdos_1128 refutes the problem's statement for
three types of cardinality by a coloring built from a locally
finite coherent rank on , and the file contains no sorry. The
community database marks the problem's solution as formalized in Lean from
2026-08-23, the date of that header. The corpus has not built the file, so
the page lists no formalized evidence. The
formal-conjectures statement file,
added on 2026-06-07, states the problem at the commit linked with three
sets of cardinality and the answer answer(False), is tagged
research solved, and attributes the counterexample in its docstrings to
Prikry and Mills (1978, unpublished). It carries no proof of their result:
the theorems erdos_1128.prikryMills and
erdos_1128.variants.prikryMills_explicit, which would construct the
coloring, end in sorry, with the transfinite construction only sketched
in comments, and the main theorem erdos_1128 rests on the first of them.
The one complete proof in the file is of a two-dimensional variant: on
the coloring by order has no monochromatic uncountable
rectangle. So that file is a statement file, not a formalization, and is
not a formalization link.