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 867 is no. The claimed result is Theorem 2.1 of D. Coppersmith and S. Phillips, On a question of Erdős on subsequence sums: for every there is a set with
in which no sum of two or more consecutive members is a member, so grows like and the bound fails. The proof opens from Freud's four-block construction and improves its density to with the paper's own Table 1; the is the paper's, which prints no count of the removed boundary elements. The same paper's Theorem 3.7 bounds every such set by members, so the maximal density lies in ; its exact value is the paper's Open Question 1 and is not the site's question. Freud's note reports the paper's upper bound as , a figure the published paper does not print. Both theorems are stated as the source card records them; the proof of Theorem 2.1 is followed but not independently checked.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki: the proof restates Freud's blocks in its own terms as its starting point, and Table 1 and its verification are the paper's own.
Acceptance. Refereed publication: SIAM J. Discrete Math. 9 (1996), no. 2, 173--177, doi:10.1137/S0895480193244139, received February 1993 and accepted in revised form April 1995, in the May 1996 issue (Crossref record, 2026-10-07; the day is filled to the first of the month). Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, credits [CoPh96] with the best known bounds on the maximal size of such a set, and the thread comment of 2025-09-02 that led to the disproved label cited the paper, by its DOI, for the better lower bound and the upper bound . The site's label and its Lean qualifier rest on Freud's construction, recorded on its own claim page.