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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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Berkes and Philipp built an increasing integer sequence x1<x2<⋯x_1<x_2<\cdots for which, at almost every α∈[0,1]\alpha\in[0,1], the discrepancy D(N)D(N) of Problem 992 satisfies

lim sup⁡N→∞D(N)(Nlog⁡N)1/2>0.\limsup_{N\to\infty}\frac{D(N)}{(N\log N)^{1/2}}>0.

For this sequence the bound D(N)≪N1/2(log⁡N)o(1)D(N)\ll N^{1/2}(\log N)^{o(1)} fails for almost every α\alpha, so both bounds the problem asks about fail, and the answer to the question is no for both. The general almost-everywhere upper bound stands at D(N)≪N1/2(log⁡N)3/2+o(1)D(N)\ll N^{1/2}(\log N)^{3/2+o(1)} (Baker [Ba81], improving the exponent 5/25/2 of Erdős–Koksma [ErKo49] and Cassels [Ca50]), so for a general integer sequence the extremal power of log⁡N\log N lies between 1/21/2 and 3/23/2. The lacunary case is different: Erdős and Gál (unpublished, as the site records) obtained D(N)≪N1/2(log⁡log⁡N)O(1)D(N)\ll N^{1/2}(\log\log N)^{O(1)} almost everywhere, and a separate 1949 Erdős–Koksma paper on lacunary sequences, not the site's [ErKo49], is on the 1949 card.

Formalization. A public Lean 4 development in Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs collection, Erdos992.lean at the commit of 2026-09-15 (the file entered the repository on 2026-08-17), declares itself a formalization of a solution to the problem, names István Berkes and Walter Philipp as its informal authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as its formal authors, and describes its construction as a self-contained resonant-block version of the mechanism of their paper. Its theorem not_erdos_992 gives a strictly increasing integer sequence and a constant c>0c>0 (the proof supplies c=1/8c=1/8) such that for almost every α∈[0,1]\alpha\in[0,1] the inequality D(N)≥c (Nlog⁡N)1/2D(N)\ge c\,(N\log N)^{1/2} holds for infinitely many NN, the discrepancy taken over half-open intervals [a,b)⊆[0,1][a,b)\subseteq[0,1]; this agrees with the statement recorded above. Not built or audited here: the formalization is a link and not acceptance evidence.

Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the result rests on the cited paper alone.

Acceptance. The result is refereed: I. Berkes and W. Philipp, The size of trigonometric and Walsh series and uniform distribution mod 1, J. London Math. Soc. (2) 50 (1994), no. 3, 454–464. Reviewed: the site's curator, T. F. Bloom, records the problem as disproved by this paper (site page last edited 2026-01-29). The site page thanks the Superhuman Reasoning team at Google DeepMind, and Feng and others (2026), on the Feng et al. card, list Problem 992 among the problems for which their Gemini-based research agent, Aletheia, pointed to existing literature, namely this paper; that is a literature identification and not a new result. The paper's print date is known to the month (December 1994), so this page is dated to the first day of that month. The paper is not held in the library; the statement above is recorded from the site's remark and the citation, and the Lean development states the same inequality.