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 764 is no: for no and no constant is . The claimed result is the theorem of R. C. Vaughan, On the addition of sequences of integers, in the form the site's commentary records: for the three-fold representation count through cannot equal with an error , the three-summand case of a general theorem on -fold convolutions that allows other main terms; it extends the Erdős–Fuchs theorem for two summands, the subject of Problem 763. The paper is not held; the statement follows the site's commentary and the formal-conjectures docstring.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.
Acceptance. Refereed publication: J. Number Theory 4 (1972), no. 1, 1--16,
doi:10.1016/0022-314X(72)90008-X; the Crossref record dates the issue to
February 1972, filled to the first of the month for this page's name. Reviewed:
the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem disproved and credits the
answer, in its strong form, to Vaughan in the problem page's commentary (empty
proof-claim tab and no thread posts). A Lean 4 development,
src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos764.lean of Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs
repository (3,873 lines at the pinned commit of 2026-09-15, first added
2026-08-17), declares itself a formalization of the negative answer: its header
names Vaughan as informal author and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors,
cites this paper, and describes its proof as the bounded-error specialization of
Vaughan's argument, by the differentiated generating-function identity, Fourier
orthogonality on a circle and a geometric kernel; its not_erdos_764 proves
that for no A : Set ℕ and c > 0 is the summatory ordered three-fold
convolution through N equal to c * N up to O(1), the bounded-error case
only, and it closes with #print axioms Erdos764.not_erdos_764 without the
printed output. The formal-conjectures statement for the problem (commit of
2026-09-20) is tagged solved and names line 3760 of the file, the theorem, as
its formal proof, and states Vaughan's error term as a variant without proof.
The corpus has not built the development, so the page lists no formalized
evidence.