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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. In every finite coloring of the positive integers there are pairwise distinct positive integers a,b,ca,b,c of one color with

1a=1b+1c.\frac1a=\frac1b+\frac1c.

Positive integers are integers, so this answers the question of Problem 303 over the integers, and in a stronger form. It is the case n=2n=2, a=1a=1 of Brown and Rödl's Corollary 2.3, which gives, for every finite coloring of the positive integers, every n≥2n\ge2 and every 1≤a≤n1\le a\le n, pairwise distinct monochromatic x0,x1,…,xnx_0,x_1,\ldots,x_n with a/x0=1/x1+⋯+1/xna/x_0=1/x_1+\cdots+1/x_n; here (a,b,c)=(x0,x1,x2)(a,b,c)=(x_0,x_1,x_2).

Route. The distinct-variable form of Rado's theorem gives a monochromatic solution of x0=x1+x2x_0=x_1+x_2 in distinct variables (Corollary 2.2). The reciprocal transfer theorem (Theorem 2.1) carries distinct-variable partition regularity of a homogeneous system to the system with every variable replaced by its reciprocal: compactness gives a finite witness interval, and y↦S/yy\mapsto S/y with SS the least common multiple of that interval turns an additive solution into a reciprocal one. The paper notes that Hanno Lefmann independently obtained the transfer theorem without the distinctness requirement (Theorem 2.1a); that version does not by itself give the pairwise-distinct conclusion the problem asks for.

Acceptance. Refereed: Brown, Tom C. and Rödl, Vojtěch, Monochromatic solutions to equations with unit fractions, Bull. Austral. Math. Soc. 43 (1991), no. 3, 387--392. The publisher's record dates the issue June 1991 and gives no day; the day in this page's name is the first of that month. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, marks Problem 303 proved and credits the coloring statement to Brown and Rödl in the problem's commentary. The library holds the journal PDF and the author's copy on the source card, whose result pages record the statements, a rewritten proof of the corollary and the structure of the transfer argument; no independent review of the proof is recorded in this corpus. A second, independent proof is Yuan's Seed-Prover Lean proof.

Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos303.lean in Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs collection at the pinned commit (the third link) declares itself a Lean formalization of a solution to Problem 303 and names Brown and Rödl as its informal authors, the Formal Conjectures authors for the statement, and Seed-Prover, Aristotle, Zheng Yuan and Boris Alexeev as its formal authors. Its theorem erdos_303 proves the site's integer formulation, distinct nonzero same-colored a,b,ca,b,c with 1/a=1/b+1/c1/a=1/b+1/c for every finite coloring of the integers, by a re-proof with Aristotle of the lemmas of Yuan's Seed-Prover proof, an independently produced proof that specializes this paper's reciprocal transfer to the single equation, with the finite Ramsey theorem (Schur's theorem) in place of Rado's theorem and compactness. This corpus built that file and checked erdos_303 against the repository's comparator challenge; the acceptance is recorded on Yuan's claim page, whose route the file follows, and this page lists no formalized evidence, since the file does not formalize the paper's argument.