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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 are a set XX of cardinality ℵ1\aleph_1 and a coloring f ⁣:X×X×X→{0,1}f\colon X\times X\times X\to\{0,1\} such that no product A1×B1×C1A_1\times B_1\times C_1 of three countably infinite subsets of XX is monochromatic. Since any three sets A,B,CA,B,C of cardinality ℵ1\aleph_1 can be identified with XX, 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,

(ℵ1ℵ1ℵ1)↛(ℵ0ℵ0ℵ0)21,1,1.\begin{pmatrix}\aleph_1\\\aleph_1\\\aleph_1\end{pmatrix} \not\to \begin{pmatrix}\aleph_0\\\aleph_0\\\aleph_0\end{pmatrix}^{1,1,1}_2 .

Komjáth's survey records beside it the positive square-bracket relation of Mills and Prikry for three colors, that every 33-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 c=ℵ3\mathfrak c=\aleph_3, of the ℵ1\aleph_1-color relation for cubes of size c\mathfrak c: every coloring of c×c×c\mathfrak c\times\mathfrak c\times\mathfrak c with ℵ1\aleph_1 colors has a monochromatic countable box. Neither bears on the two-color question for cubes of size ℵ1\aleph_1.

Source. The result is unpublished. Komjáth's survey cites it as C. Mills and K. Prikry, Some recent results about partitions of ω1\omega_1, unpublished, and the site dates it to 1978; the year is the only date recorded, so this page's date is the first day of that year.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 ℵ1\aleph_1 by a coloring built from a locally finite coherent rank on ω1\omega_1, 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 ℵ1\aleph_1 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 ω1\omega_1 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.