Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Hanson and Seyffarth, -saturated graphs of prescribed maximum degree, Congressus Numerantium (1984); the page's reference [HaSe84] gives pp. 169--182, Füredi and Seress cite volume 42, pp. 169--182, and Haviv and Levy cite volume 44, pp. 127--138. The account below rests on the site's commentary and on the two papers that build on it. The page name carries the publication year; the day is not recorded in any source read.
The result. A subset of an abelian group is symmetric when , sum-free when no satisfy , and complete when every element of is a sum of two elements of . Hanson and Seyffarth observed that the Cayley graph of with connection set is then an -regular triangle-free graph of diameter on vertices (the observation Haviv and Levy attribute to them in Section 1 of [HaLe18]); Haviv and Levy remark there, in their own words, that completeness forces . Hanson and Seyffarth constructed such sets in cyclic groups for (the range Haviv and Levy state for the result) of size , so that along this sequence. The site's commentary records the bound as ; Füredi and Seress (Section 6 of [FuSe94]) report it as , and the remark in the 2 July 2024 version of Alon's note, also cited on Problem 134, gives and adds that a Cayley graph of an abelian group cannot have maximum degree below , the lower limit the site's constant matches; the constant is not checked here.
Covers. The second question: does not tend to infinity, because for infinitely many while the trivial bound holds for every . The sources differ on the range of the bound: the site, Füredi and Seress and the remark in Alon's note state it for all large , while Haviv and Levy state it, for the symmetric complete sum-free sets in , along . This page records the narrower range and does not claim the order of growth for every , although the sequence has consecutive ratios tending to and duplicating vertices (which keeps a graph triangle-free of diameter and at most doubles its maximum degree) carries a bound along it to every large , the step the Lean development below takes. The order of growth for every is recorded under the two refereed full claims, Füredi and Seress and Haviv and Levy.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the construction is self-contained.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos133.lean of Boris
Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs, first committed on 2026-08-17 and
linked above at a commit of 2026-09-15, declares itself a Lean formalization
of a solution to Problem 133 and names David Hanson and Kathy Seyffarth as
informal authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors. It defines
as the least maximum degree and proves, as erdos_133, that
for every , that
and that does not tend to infinity; the upper bound uses an
explicit graph on the pairs of elements of a finite set with a
fixed-point-free involution, followed by vertex duplication, rather than
Hanson and Seyffarth's Cayley graphs, and the file ends with
#print axioms erdos_133. The formal-conjectures statement file of the
problem points to this declaration as its formal proof (see the problem
page). The corpus has not built, kernel-checked or audited the file, so the
evidence stays reviewed only.
Acceptance. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom, marks the problem DISPROVED
and credits the bound to Hanson and Seyffarth under the reference [HaSe84] in
the commentary; that credit is the reviewed evidence, and Bloom took no part
in the paper. The conjecture that the bound refutes is
Erdős and Pach's as [Er97b] words it. Two refereed papers restate the result as
established: Füredi and Seress (J. Graph Theory 18 (1994), Section 6) write that
Hanson and Seyffarth determined the true order of magnitude, and Haviv and Levy
(Israel J. Math. 227 (2018), Section 1) extend it to every . These are
documented acceptances by named experts; whether Congressus Numerantium refereed
the paper is not documented here, so refereed is not listed.