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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. The answer to Problem 658 is yes. The claimed result is Theorem 1.1 of J. Solymosi, A note on a question of Erdős and Graham: for every real δ>0\delta>0 there is N0(δ)N_0(\delta) such that for N>N0N>N_0 every S⊆[N]2S\subseteq[N]^2 with ∣S∣≥δN2|S|\ge\delta N^2 contains a quadruple {(a,b),(a+d,b),(a,b+d),(a+d,b+d)}\{(a,b),(a+d,b),(a,b+d),(a+d,b+d)\} with integer d≠0d\ne0, where [N]={0,…,N−1}[N]=\{0,\ldots,N-1\}. The grid differs from the site's {1,…,N}2\{1,\ldots,N\}^2 by a translation, and an axis-parallel square is a square, so the theorem gives the site's conclusion in Graham's axis-parallel form and hence in the form allowing any square. The proof lifts SS to S×[N]⊆[N]3S\times[N]\subseteq[N]^3, where a square corresponds to a quadruple {(a,b,c),(a+d,b,c),(a,b+d,c),(a+d,b+d,c+d)}\{(a,b,c),(a+d,b,c),(a,b+d,c),(a+d,b+d,c+d)\}, d≠0d\ne0, and builds a four-partite 33-uniform hypergraph whose vertices are the planes parallel to the four faces of that configuration, with an edge for each triple of planes from distinct classes that meets in a point of the lifted set. Four planes, one from each class, form a complete subgraph when each of their triples meets in the set: the four planes through one point give a degenerate one, and a non-degenerate one is exactly a quadruple. If the set contains no quadruple, every edge lies in exactly one complete subgraph, so the Frankl–Rödl theorem gives o(N3)o(N^3) edges, while the hypergraph has 4∣S×[N]∣=4N∣S∣4|S\times[N]|=4N|S| edges; so ∣S∣≥δN2|S|\ge\delta N^2 forces a quadruple once NN is large. The paper states no bound: its Remark says that, because the Frankl–Rödl theorem rests on the regularity lemma, the method's bound on N0N_0 is at best of tower type. The statement, the one-page proof and the lifting are recorded on the source card; the argument takes the Frankl–Rödl theorem as an external premise (claims checked; proof not verified). The qualitative statement was known before, from the density Hales–Jewett theorem; the paper's contribution is a combinatorial argument whose bound, though not stated, is at best of tower type.

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Acceptance. Refereed publication: Combin. Probab. Comput. 13 (2004), no. 2, 263--267, doi:10.1017/S0963548303005959; the Crossref record dates the issue to March 2004, filled to the first of the month for this page's name (received 29 August 2002, revised 17 November 2002). Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem proved and credits the quantitative proof to Solymosi in the problem page's commentary (accessed; empty proof-claim tab). A Lean 4 development, src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos658.lean of Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs repository (1,532 lines at the pinned commit of 2026-09-15, first added 2026-05-12), declares itself a formalization of this paper's Theorem 1.1: its header names Solymosi, Frankl and Rödl as informal authors and Aristotle (Harmonic) and John Jennings as formal authors, and its erdos_658 states the theorem over Finset (ℤ × ℤ) and [N]^2 with d ≠ 0, applying Theorem_1_1 to frankl_roedl_theorem, a theorem of the repository's Util.FranklRodl module derived from the repository's hypergraph removal development, not an axiom. The file records #print axioms output propext, Classical.choice and Quot.sound for Theorem_1_1 and Theorem_1_2 and no output for erdos_658. It grew from two gists that John Jennings posted on the site's thread on 2026-04-20 and 2026-04-21, the first conditional on the Frankl–Rödl theorem and the second stating it as an axiom; the formal-conjectures statement for the problem (pinned above at its commit of 2026-10-06, accessed 2026-10-07) is tagged solved and names line 1516 of the file, the theorem, as its formal proof. This corpus has not built the development, so the page lists no formalized evidence.