Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
The manuscript An Additive Counterexample: Erdős Problem 897, produced by the Archivara Math Research Agent and posted on 2025-12-26, constructs an explicit additive function of the shape on prime powers with a slowly growing . As recorded in the summary of its Lean formalization, the construction gives , , for all large , and , so both questions have answer no. The claimant is the organization Archivara, which published the manuscript on its platform under its agent's name; a member of its team posted the link on the site's discussion thread the same day, and the team's mathematician states there that they verified the proof before publication and that no human took part in writing it. The team also published a human-written companion exposition on the same platform, which contains no proof and is not listed among the links.
Formalization. The second link is a Lean 4 file proving erdos_897.parts.i
and erdos_897.parts.ii: for each question, the statement that every additive
(additive on coprime positive arguments) with
has
, respectively
, is equivalent to false; the limits superior
are taken in the extended reals. The two statements are the ones the
formal-conjectures project wrote for the problem in its
statement file.
The file's header declares it a formalization of a solution to the problem, says
that the proof is the Archivara manuscript's, auto-formalized by Aristotle from
Harmonic (the thread post of 2025-12-27 announcing it says the system was
operated mostly by L. Wu), that the original proof is Wirsing's, and that it
checks under Lean 4.24.0 and Mathlib at the v4.24.0 commit; the file runs to 942
lines, builds an explicit , proves the four properties listed above, and its
closing #print axioms lines record the closure propext, Classical.choice,
Quot.sound for both theorems. The pinned file contains no sorry, axiom or
native_decide; the file is not among the Lean the corpus has built and
audited, so formalized is not listed as evidence.
Acceptance. Reviewed: on the discussion thread, Nat Sothanaphan, who is independent of Archivara, wrote on 2025-12-26 that they had read the writeup and found the proof correct, with one caveat, that the proof of the manuscript's Corollary 2 shows only rather than equality; the inequality is all the second question needs, so the caveat does not affect the answer. On the same day Tao wrote that the argument looked good to them and noted that any nonnegative counterexample to the first question becomes one to the second after adding ; on 2025-12-27 Tao classified the manuscript as an independent rediscovery of a counterexample already in the literature, the one Wirsing published in 1981 and recorded on Wirsing 1981. The site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, credits the construction to Wirsing and does not name the manuscript, so Bloom's credit is recorded on Wirsing's page and not as evidence here. After the formalization was posted on the thread on 2025-12-27, the site labels the problem DISPROVED (LEAN) (page last edited 1 April 2026), the community database records the formal status Lean, and the formal-conjectures statement file, at the commit linked above, marks both parts research solved with their formal-proof attribute pointing at this Lean file on its repository's main branch. The problem page is Problem 897.