Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. Problem 1176 asks whether every graph of chromatic number has a coloring of its edges with colors such that, whenever the vertices are partitioned into countably many classes, some class contains an edge of every edge color. In the notation of Erdős, Galvin and Hajnal (1975, §6), this is the property , and the question is the case of their Problem 3, which asks whether holds for every graph of chromatic number . The abstract of the paper states the conjecture in the catalog's form, for a graph on a ground set with chromatic number , and announces several partial results, variants and consistency results concerning it. The booklet [Va99, 7.93], which is the problem's source, and the site's remark credit Hajnal and Komjáth with the consistency of the statement: it holds in some model of ZFC, so ZFC does not refute it, which the site labels NOT DISPROVABLE. The scope and the model of the consistency theorem are stated below from a secondary source. The statement is not known to be a theorem of ZFC.
Covers. One side of an independence result: the statement holds in a model of ZFC, so ZFC does not refute it. The other side, that ZFC does not prove the statement, is not established, and one side alone leaves the question open, so the claim leaves the problem open.
Evidence. The publisher's record of the paper gives the dates received 13 August 2000 and published January 2003. The scope and the model of the consistency theorem come from a secondary source, Dániel T. Soukup's workshop handout Open problems around uncountable graphs (University of East Anglia, November 2015), on its source card: its Conjecture 6.1, attributed there to Erdős and Hajnal, is the catalog's conjecture for every graph of chromatic number (an edge coloring such that for every partition some carries every color), and the handout records that it holds consistently, that adding a single Cohen real suffices, and that the result is the paper above. So the theorem covers every graph of chromatic number and holds in the extension by one Cohen real. The booklet of 1999 credits the consistency before the paper's receipt, so the result predates its publication.
Source. András Hajnal and Péter Komjáth, Some remarks on the simultaneous chromatic number, Combinatorica 23 (2003), no. 1, 89--104; DOI 10.1007/s00493-003-0015-2. The publisher dates the issue January 2003 and gives no day, so this page is dated the first of that month. The problem's own statement is Problem 3 of §6 of P. Erdős, F. Galvin and A. Hajnal, On set-systems having large chromatic number and not containing prescribed subsystems (Colloq. Math. Soc. János Bolyai 10, 1975, pp. 425--513), on its source card, where (Definition 6.2) holds when the edge set can be split into classes so that every partition of the vertices into fewer than classes has a class containing an edge of every edge class.
Acceptance. Refereed: a journal paper in Combinatorica. Reviewed: the
curator of erdosproblems.com, T. F. Bloom, labels the problem NOT DISPROVABLE
and the page's remark credits Hajnal and Komjáth with the consistency (problem
page last edited 24 January 2026); a thread comment of 18 March 2026 asked for
the label. The formal-conjectures statement file erdos_1176 carries the same
remark and the category research open; it is a statement, not a formalization of
the result.
Depends on. No other wiki page; the claim rests on the paper above.