Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For every positive integer , every graph with at least edges, its number of vertices, contains a topological complete subgraph of order : vertices joined pairwise by internally vertex-disjoint paths, that is, a subdivision of . This is Theorem 4 of B. Bollobás and A. Thomason, Proof of a conjecture of Mader, Erdős and Hajnal on topological complete subgraphs, European J. Combin. 19 (1998), no. 8, 883--887, read and paged by the corpus at Theorem 4. With it is the question of Problem 718 as the page states it, with ; the paper presents it as the proof of the conjecture of Mader and of Erdős and Hajnal. The proof reduces to the paper's linkage theorem (its Theorem 1) through Mader's theorem on -connected subgraphs and a minor of large minimum degree.
Dating and the two papers. The site's key for the proof is the authors' earlier paper Highly linked graphs, Combinatorica 16 (1996), no. 3, 313--320 (September 1996), which the 1998 paper names, as its reference [3], as the place where the stronger result that every graph with edges has a -linked subgraph appears, a result the 1998 paper says gives the conjecture with a constant below by a longer argument. Komlós and Szemerédi's paper of March 1996 already calls the conjecture recently proved by Bollobás and Thomason, so a version of the Bollobás--Thomason proof existed by March 1996, on a date not known here. This page is dated by the 1996 paper, the earliest dated Bollobás--Thomason publication bearing on the result, while the statement above is taken from the 1998 paper, the short direct proof the corpus has read; the 1996 paper is not held, and whether it prints the theorem itself is not checked.
Acceptance. Both papers are refereed publications (Combinatorica,
September 1996; European Journal of Combinatorics, November 1998, received 15
March 1997, per their Crossref records; the refereed evidence),
and the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, records the problem as proved by them
together with the independent proof of
Komlós and Szemerédi
(the reviewed evidence; Bloom took no part in either paper).
A refereed attestation is in print: Fox, Lee and Sudakov quote the theorem as
their Theorem 3.1 (Combinatorica 33 (2013), 181--197), paged at
Theorem 3.1,
attributing it to both pairs of authors. The basis of this page is the
statement of Theorem 4 and its half-page proof in the 1998 paper, with the
reduction followed at filing depth; of the proofs of its Theorem 1 and Lemma 3
only the structure is recorded, and nothing is independently reviewed.
The acceptance recorded here rests on the publications, the printed
attestation and the site's acceptance, not on a local review.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos718.lean of
Boris Alexeev's plby/lean-proofs repository, at the commit linked above,
declares itself a formalization of this theorem: its header names János
Komlós, Endre Szemerédi, Béla Bollobás, Andrew Thomason, Robin Thomas and
Paul Wollan as informal authors (Thomas and Wollan for the linkedness theorem
the proof uses) and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors, and the note
ErdosProblems/Erdos718.md calls it a formalized proof of Erdős Problem 718.
Its first theorem,
containsCliqueSubdivision_of_edgeCard, states that a graph with at least
edges contains a -subdivision, a constant below the of
the printed theorems. This corpus has not built the development, printed its
axioms or audited its definitions against the problem statement; the basis
of this account is the header and the note at the pinned commit. The
development is therefore a link on this page and no formalized evidence;
the same file is linked from
Komlós and Szemerédi's page.