Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
The claim. Write for the largest number of comparable pairs in a family of subsets of , the number of edges of maximized over families of size . Theorem 1.4 of N. Alon and P. Frankl, The maximum number of disjoint pairs in a family of subsets, Graphs Combin. 1 (1985), 13--21: for every positive integer there is such that if with then ; for the probabilistic argument of Section 2 gives the explicit bound for every family of sets. Example 6.1 of the same paper: with an equipartition, the sets meeting in at most elements together with the sets missing at most elements of form a family of size of order in which at least a fraction of the pairs are comparable.
Covers. The second and third questions of Problem 777, as the site's commentary reads them. The third has the answer yes: given , let satisfy ; a family with sets has fewer than comparable pairs, which is below for any fixed once is large, so more than edges forces . The second has the answer no: Example 6.1 with is a family with sets and at least edges, so a positive fraction of comparable pairs does not force (the site states the same family with the constant ; the constant does not affect the answer). The paper does not state the first question; the site credits that answer to Alon, Das, Glebov and Sudakov, whose page settles it.
Read depth. The edition read is the journal article, described on the source card (the card carries no digest). Proof coverage: Theorem 1.4, the Section 2 bound and Example 6.1 at statement depth; the two deductions under Covers are this page's own reading of the site's attribution. The size of Example 6.1 is of order , as the paper's own asymptotics and Alon, Das, Glebov and Sudakov's restatement give it.
The formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos777.lean of
Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs repository (plby/lean-proofs), linked above at
the commit of 15 September 2026, declares itself a Lean formalization of a
solution to Problem 777, naming Noga Alon, Péter Frankl, Shagnik Das, Roman
Glebov and Benny Sudakov as informal authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as
formal authors (Lean and Mathlib v4.33.0; added 17 August 2026). Its
theorem erdos_777 states and proves all three answers, yes, no and yes, so
it covers this page's two questions as well as the first; the repository's
note ErdosProblems/Erdos777.md is the record link. The corpus has not
built or audited the file, so formalized is not listed.
Acceptance. Refereed: Graphs and Combinatorics, volume 1 (1985), 13--21 (issue dated December 1985 in the Crossref record; the page name uses the first day of that month). Reviewed: the site's curator, T. F. Bloom, credits the paper with the negative answer to the second question and the affirmative answer to the third in the problem's commentary (erdosproblems.com/777, accessed 2026-10-07), and Alon, Das, Glebov and Sudakov restate Theorem 1.4 as their Theorem 1.1 and the construction in their Section 2.