Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For every and every there is a monic polynomial such that has at least distinct components of diameter at least . This is Theorem 1 (p. 98) of Ch. Pommerenke, On metric properties of complex polynomials, Michigan Math. J. 8 (1961), no. 2, 97–115, recorded with its one-paragraph proof on the result page. The paper states it as the negative answer to Problems 8 and 9 of Erdős, Herzog and Piranian (1958), from which Problem 511 descends. The problem asks, for every , whether has components of diameter above independently of the degree. For any choose with : the proof places disjoint segments of length in the interior of , which is the open set, so the open set has at least components of diameter at least , and no bound independent of exists. The answer to the question as posed is therefore no. The range cannot be enlarged, since by Pólya's theorem no component has diameter above .
Acceptance. The paper is a refereed journal publication, received 26
November 1960, the refereed evidence; the publisher's record gives the
year 1961 and no month or day, and this page is dated to the first day of
that year. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem disproved
and credits the negative answer to this paper, the reviewed evidence; the
site also records Huang's 2025 independent rediscovery, which has
its own claim page. The
result page notes that the proof quotes the approximation theorem at
capacity one and applies it to a set of smaller capacity without the
rescaling spelled out; the note is not a review verdict and awards nothing
by this corpus.
Depends on. Nothing beyond the cited paper.