Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai, A counterexample to Borsuk's conjecture, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 29 (1993), no. 1, 60--62 (received 30 June 1992); arXiv:math/9307229 is the published article, added to arXiv in the Bulletin's 1999 migration and dated to the July 1993 issue. The paper answers the question no. Write for the least number of sets of diameter that cover every set of diameter in . For a prime power the paper sends each equal cut of the complete graph on vertices to the incidence vector of its crossing edges; two such vectors are at maximal distance exactly when the cuts cross in a prescribed way, and the Frankl--Wilson forbidden-intersection theorem bounds every family of cuts that avoids that intersection size. The resulting finite sets give for every sufficiently large , far above . The paper's Remark 1 states explicit instances: the statement fails for and for every . The corpus records the theorem at Theorem 1 and the finite-dimension remark at Remark 1 of the source card.
Acceptance. The result is refereed: it appeared in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom, marks the problem disproved and credits Kahn and Kalai for the disproof, with Brouwer and Jenrich for the smallest dimension the site records (problem page last edited 30 December 2025). The corpus's own rewritten chain for Theorem 1 passed an independent review at its stated scope, retained on the source card; that record is local proof coverage and is not counted as acceptance evidence here.
Formalization. Boris Alexeev's GitHub repository lean-proofs holds, at
the pinned commit linked above, a Lean 4 file whose header declares it a
formalization of a solution to Problem 505 whose original proof was found by
Kahn and Kalai, auto-formalized by Aristotle (Harmonic). The file follows a
self-contained Kahn--Kalai type construction in dimension 946: it defines the
Borsuk number, constructs a finite set in and proves that
its Borsuk number is at least 1650 (Erdos505.f_946_ge_1650,
Erdos505.not_erdos_505), under Lean 4.24.0 and the Mathlib revision the
file's header names. Alexeev announced it on the site's discussion thread on
3 February 2026; the site's label carries a Lean marker. The dimension and
the explicit set differ from the paper's , and this corpus has not
built the file, audited its axioms or reviewed its statement, so the file is
a link here and not formalized evidence.
The formal-conjectures file
BorsukConjecture.lean,
to which the problem's statement file points, states the general failure as
borsuk_conjecture.not_forall, credits it to Kahn and Kalai, and attaches
as its formal proof a Lean development in a fork of that repository
(mo271/formal-conjectures, commit of 4 September 2026). That proof does not
formalize Kahn and Kalai's construction: it derives the general failure from
the fork's dimension-65 counterexample of Bondarenko's construction. It is
therefore not a formalization link on this page, and this corpus has not
built it, so it gives no formalized evidence here.