Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Let be the set of positive integers whose binary expansion has nonzero
digits only in even places and the set with nonzero digits only in odd
places. Both have elements up to for all large , and
every has at most one representation with and
, since the two sets of digit positions are disjoint (exactly one
when is admitted to both sets, as the site's remark counts, since the
positions then also cover every ). If with
and then , and the
uniqueness gives and , so there is no solution with
nonzero difference and the answer to
Problem 331 is no. Ruzsa
communicated the counterexample to the site. The same counterexample was
published in 1984 by Erdős and Freud (J. Number Theory 18, 99--109), who
quote the question from the 1980 monograph and answer it with the integers
using only even, respectively only odd, powers of two, without crediting
Ruzsa; that publication has
its own claim page.
The site also records Ruzsa's suggested variant, which asks the same
question under the stronger hypothesis
and likewise for
; that variant is not the problem's question. Theorem 4 of Erdős and
Freud answers it yes: when and
the equation has only trivial solutions, neither nor
tends to a limit, so sets with the asymptotics of the
variant cannot have only finitely many nontrivial solutions: removing the
finitely many elements of involved in them would leave sets with the
same asymptotics and none. The formal-conjectures
statement file records that reading at its revision of 30 September 2026
(linked above), marking the variant erdos_331.variants.ruzsa solved in
the affirmative with the paper as its source.
Acceptance. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem disproved on erdosproblems.com, states the counterexample in the page's commentary with the remark that it is easily checked, and thanks Ruzsa for it; the curator's acceptance is the documented acceptance. The remark is not dated on the site; its earliest documented appearance is the Wayback Machine's snapshot of the problem page of 2024-06-19, which already carries the remark, the variant, the thanks to Ruzsa and the solved label, and the page is dated to that snapshot.
Formalization. The site's label carries a Lean mark. It refers to a Lean 4
formalization of Ruzsa's counterexample that Wouter van Doorn posted in the
site's discussion thread on 2026-01-31, written with the help of Aristotle
(Harmonic), with a link to type-check it online; the post reports that the work
exposed a mistake in the formal-conjectures statement of the problem, for which
van Doorn opened an issue. The file, in van Doorn's Lean-files repository
(added 2026-03-02, linked above at the revision the formal-conjectures project
pins), states Lean v4.24.0 and its Mathlib commit in its header, proves
main_theorem (two sets of positive integers, each with at least $\tfrac14
\sqrt N$ elements up to for all large , with no equal nonzero
differences) and derives erdos_331, the negation of the statement that for all
with and
likewise for , the set of quadruples in , in
with is infinite; the corrected formal-conjectures
statement file (linked above at its revision of 30 September 2026), whose own
theorem is sorry, states the same proposition and records the file as its
formal proof. Boris Alexeev's repository lean-proofs carries a copy of the file
for four Mathlib versions (linked above at its commit of 2026-09-15, with the
repository's record page), whose header names Ruzsa as the informal author and
Aristotle and Wouter van Doorn as the formal authors. The file declares itself a
formalization of Ruzsa's counterexample, so it and its copies are listed on this
page and have no page of their own. No formalized evidence is listed: that
evidence means Lean this corpus built and audited, and the file is a third-party
development. The disproof rests on the counterexample as the site records it and
as Erdős and Freud published it.