Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Theorem 1 of Ford, Luca and Pomerance states that the equation has infinitely many solutions, and that for some and every large at least integers are values of both and . The first sentence answers Problem 48 in the affirmative. The proof is unconditional: the common values are built as of a product of primes with smooth and shown to be totient values through the implication that makes a value of ; 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 with
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
for every . 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.