Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The answer to Problem 763 is no: for no and no constant is . The claimed result is Theorem 1 of P. Erdős and W. H. J. Fuchs, On a problem of additive number theory: for an increasing sequence of positive integers let count the pairs with ; then for the relation
cannot hold. That is the journal's form of the theorem, as the zbMATH review
of the paper (Zbl 0070.04104, by S. Selberg) and the site's commentary give it
and as the formal-conjectures variant erdos_763.variants.erdos_fuchs states
it; the 1954 Cornell technical-report printing that preceded the journal paper
prints the weaker error term ,
. The paper introduces the theorem as the proof of the
Erdős–Turán conjecture that cannot hold, which is the site's
question with counting ordered pairs; the paper
notes that the result holds equally for the counts over , or all
pairs, and for sequences of nonnegative reals. The method is a
generating-function argument: with , the assumed
asymptotic is integrated against on a circle of radius close to
and contradicted by a lemma bounding such contour integrals. This page rests
on the statement and the opening remarks of the 1954 printing, as the
source card
records; the proof pages of that scan are legible, but no proof check is
recorded. Montgomery and Vaughan, after unpublished work of Jurkat,
extended the impossibility to an error term
(their claim page).
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.
Acceptance. Refereed publication: J. London Math. Soc. 31 (1956), no. 1,
67--73, doi:10.1112/jlms/s1-31.1.67; the Crossref record dates the issue to
January 1956, filled to the first of the month for this page's name. The 1954
printing is the Cornell University and Air Force Office of Scientific Research
technical report of August 1954 that preceded the journal paper; the journal's
pagination comes from the Crossref record and the zbMATH review, not from that
printing. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem
DISPROVED and credits the answer, in its strong form, to Erdős and Fuchs in the
problem page's commentary (the proof-claim tab is empty and the thread has no
posts). A Lean 4 development, src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos763.lean of Boris
Alexeev's lean-proofs repository (1,495 lines at the pinned commit of
2026-09-15, first added 2026-08-17), declares itself a formalization of the
solution: its header names Erdős, Fuchs, Montgomery and Vaughan as informal
authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors, and its not_erdos_763
proves that for no A : Set ℕ and c > 0 is the summatory ordered
representation count through N equal to c * N up to O(1), the
bounded-error case only, by a Parseval argument on a circle; it closes with
#print axioms not_erdos_763 without the printed output. The formal-conjectures
statement for the problem (commit of 2026-09-20) is tagged solved and names line
1464 of the file, the theorem, as its formal proof; it also states the
Erdős–Fuchs and Montgomery–Vaughan error terms as variants without proofs. The
corpus has not built the development, so the page lists no formalized
evidence.