Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. The answer to Problem 476 is yes: for a prime and , the restricted sumset has at least elements. The claimed result is Theorem 4.1 of J. A. Dias da Silva and Y. O. Hamidoune, Cyclic spaces for Grassmann derivatives and additive theory: for a finite subset of a field of characteristic (with in characteristic zero) and a positive integer , the set of sums of distinct elements of satisfies
the remark after the proof states the case for as the conjecture of Erdős and Heilbronn, and Example 4.1, the image of in , shows the bound sharp. The theorem, read for sums of exactly distinct elements, implies conjecture (73) of Erdős's 1965 lectures, which asks for distinct sums of at most distinct residues out of ; the paper does not state that conjecture. The proof is by linear algebra and the representation theory of the symmetric group: the diagonal operator with spectrum has a derivative on the th Grassmann space whose spectrum is , and the degree of that derivative's minimal polynomial is bounded below through a cyclic-subspace bound (Theorem 3.2) and a hook-length identity drawn from the characters of the symmetric group (Corollary 2.3). Read depth: claims checked for the statement, the remark and the example on the result page of the source card; the proof read for structure, and nothing in its chain checked. For the restricted sumset is empty and the bound is at most , so the content of the statement is the case .
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.
Acceptance. Refereed publication: Bulletin of the London Mathematical
Society 26 (1994), no. 2, 140--146, issued March 1994 (Crossref record; the
date of this page). Reviewed: the site's curator (T. F. Bloom) labels the
problem proved and credits Dias da Silva and Hamidoune with the affirmative
answer, citing [dSHa94] (page last edited 30 September 2025); the theorem is
standard in the literature on restricted sumsets, restated with credit by
Alon, Nathanson and Ruzsa in 1995 and 1996
(their page)
and reported by Guy in section C15 of his 2004 collection. The paper's printed
Corollary 3.3 omits a with that Theorem 3.2 carries and the proof
of Theorem 4.1 uses, a filing observation recorded on the source card. The
site's Lean mark refers to an external Lean proof that follows the polynomial
method and is recorded as a formalization link on
the Alon--Nathanson--Ruzsa page;
it does not formalize this paper's argument and is third-party Lean, so no
formalized evidence is listed.