Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. The answer to Problem 204 is no. Call a system of congruences coprime-disjoint when any two distinct congruences in it that share a solution have coprime moduli. No integer admits residue classes , one for each divisor of , that cover every integer and form a coprime-disjoint system. Erdős and Graham asked the question in 1980 and expected this answer; the site's commentary records that the density of such was already known to be zero. The paper is S. Adenwalla, A Question of Erdős and Graham on Covering Systems, INTEGERS 26 (2026), #A52 (received 22 May 2025, accepted 31 March 2026, published 1 May 2026; also arXiv:2501.15170, first posted 2025-01-25, the page name's date). It also gives a necessary condition for the divisors of above one to carry a coprime-disjoint system at all, without the covering requirement (its Lemma 3.1: if is the least prime factor of , then has fewer than distinct prime factors), shows that the condition is also sufficient for and for (Propositions 4.1 and 4.2), conjectures the converse (Conjecture 5.1, for which it notes a claimed proof by Jia, Li and Liu, arXiv:2504.09579), and studies the largest density such a system can cover for a given . The argument is elementary, working with the divisor lattice and the density of the covered residues. The library holds the paper and its transcription at the source card.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki: the proof is the paper's own.
Acceptance. Refereed: INTEGERS 26 (2026), #A52, published 2026-05-01
(doi:10.5281/zenodo.19949505), linked above as the paper; the published version
keeps the arXiv labels (Lemma 3.1, Theorem 3.2, Propositions 4.1 and 4.2,
Conjecture 5.1). Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, credits
Adenwalla with the proof that no such exist, thanks Adenwalla on the problem
page, and labels the problem disproved with a Lean qualification (page last
edited 2025-12-28, as of 2026-10-07); Bloom is independent of the author.
Formal-conjectures tags its statement of the problem research solved and
points to the Lean proof linked above (the catalog revision of 2026-10-06,
linked as a record). The arXiv version was first posted 2025-01-25 and revised
to a third version of ten pages on 2025-12-03. Not counted as formalized: the
linked Lean 4 file (Lean v4.24.0, with its Mathlib commit stated in the
header, committed 2026-03-15 and announced on the site's discussion thread the
same day) states in its header that the formalization of Adenwalla's proof was
produced by Aristotle, Harmonic's system, so it is a formalization of this
claimant's result and not an independent proof. Its main theorem T1 proves
that no is coprime-disjoint covering, with overlap defined as a common
solution of two congruences; the file closes with erdos_204, a restatement
under the formal-conjectures wording derived from T1, and at the pinned commit
that wrapper writes the overlap hypothesis as an implication (x ≡ a d → x ≡ a d') where the formal-conjectures statement at the linked revision has a
conjunction, so the wrapper as written is a weaker corollary of the
formal-conjectures statement while T1 carries the intended condition. The file
ends with #print axioms commands for both theorems. This corpus has not built
or audited the development, so it gives no formalized evidence and the Lean
development is described and not counted.
Not covered. Nothing of the question remains. The largest density that the divisors of a given can cover under the coprime-disjoint condition is the paper's further study and a separate question.