Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The statement of [[problems/discrete_geometry/E0846/_index|Problem
846]] is false: there is an infinite and an
such that every -point subset of contains at least
points with no three on a line, while is not a finite union
of sets with no three on a line. The Lean theorem erdos_846 in the
formal-conjectures repository proves answer(False) for the problem's formal
statement, with the definitions of the statement file: a set is
-non-trilinear when every finite subset has a collinear-free
subset of size at least , and weakly non-trilinear when it is a
finite union of collinear-free sets. The argument, as summarized on the site's
forum: label the vertices of the infinite complete graph by a rapidly growing
sequence and place one point
for each edge; three points are
collinear exactly when their edges form a triangle; a graph with edges has
a bipartite subgraph with at least edges, so works; and
by the infinite Ramsey theorem every finite coloring of the edges has a
monochromatic triangle, so no finite union of collinear-free sets covers the
points.
Source. DeepMind reports, in a post of 2026-02-25 on the site's forum,
that a DeepMind prover agent found the proof on 2026-02-21 without human
guidance beyond the formal statement from formal-conjectures, and that the file
compiles with Lean 4.22. The announcement was posted for DeepMind by a
member of its team, George Tsoukalas, whom the Lean copy linked above lists as
a formal author beside the agent; the organization is taken as the claimant,
following the site's credit, and the agent is the system the post names. The
proof is the formal-conjectures file at the commit of 2026-02-25 linked above
(the file at main has since reverted to the statement with sorry, carrying
a formal_proof attribute that points at that commit); a copy, whose header
names the agent as informal author and the agent and Tsoukalas as formal
authors, is in a public repository of Lean proofs of Erdős problems. The
construction is the one of
Putterman, Sawhney and Valiant,
found independently. Both results were announced on the site's forum on
2026-02-25, DeepMind's first, Putterman, Sawhney and Valiant's later the same
day with a hosted copy of their paper, whose arXiv submission is stamped
2026-02-24.
Acceptance. The site's curator, T. F. Bloom, marks the problem disproved
and credits DeepMind with an independent disproof on the problem's page at
erdosproblems.com (page last edited 2026-04-10, read 2026-10-07); that credit
is the reviewed evidence. The Lean proof is third-party Lean that this
corpus has not built or audited, so the claim is not formalized here, and
there is no refereed write-up.