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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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Theorem 1 of Ford, Luca and Pomerance states that the equation ϕ(a)=σ(b)\phi(a)=\sigma(b) has infinitely many solutions, and that for some α>0\alpha>0 and every large xx at least exp⁡((log⁡log⁡x)α)\exp((\log\log x)^{\alpha}) integers n≤xn\le x are values of both ϕ\phi and σ\sigma. The first sentence answers Problem 48 in the affirmative. The proof is unconditional: the common values are built as σ\sigma of a product of primes pp with p+1p+1 smooth and shown to be totient values through the implication that ϕ(rad⁡(m))∣m\phi(\operatorname{rad}(m))\mid m makes mm a value of ϕ\phi; the input is the Ford–Konyagin–Luca bound on prime chains, estimates for primes in progressions, and Heath-Brown's theorem that Siegel zeros would force infinitely many twin primes. The digest is on the source card ford_2010_common_values_arithmetic_functions.

Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the result rests on the refereed paper linked above.

Formalization. The repository plby/lean-proofs holds src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos48.lean (610 lines at the pinned commit linked above), whose header declares it a Lean formalization of a solution to the problem with Ford, Luca and Pomerance as informal authors, the Formal Conjectures authors as statement authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors, and whose module docstring says that it formalizes their argument and packages the result in the statement of the Formal Conjectures project. Its theorem erdos_48 states that the set of pairs (n,m)(n,m) with ϕ(n)=σ(m)\phi(n)=\sigma(m) is infinite; it imports two further modules of the repository's problem 48 development, and the file itself contains no sorry and no axiom; its closing #print axioms erdos_48 line records no output. The statement file of formal-conjectures names this file in a formal_proof attribute (the pinned link is on the problem page), and Jayyhk/erdos-lean holds a flattened copy with the import closure concatenated and Mathlib as the only import (the second formalization link). The file declares itself a formalization of this paper's result, so it is recorded here and gets no page of its own. This corpus has not built, kernel-checked or audited it.

Acceptance. Refereed: Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 42 (2010), no. 3, 478–488, published online 2010-03-24. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, credits the affirmative answer to this paper in the problem's commentary, and Garaev's refereed paper of 2011 (Mosc. J. Comb. Number Theory 1 (2011), no. 3, 42–49; its own accepted claim page is Garaev 2011) takes the theorem as its starting point and sharpens the count to exp⁡((log⁡log⁡x)A)\exp((\log\log x)^{A}) for every A>0A>0. The site's label is PROVED (LEAN); this corpus has not built or audited the Lean development linked above, so no formalized evidence is listed.