Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. P. Erdős, On a problem in graph theory, Math. Gaz. 47 (1963),
no. 361, 220--223, DOI 10.2307/3613396 (issued October 1963, the nominal first
day of which is this page's date). Writing for the least order of a
tournament in which every vertices have a common dominator (Schütte's
property ), the paper proves on p. 221
(inequality (1)
and
inequalities (2) and (2.1))
that and , that for every (1), and
that (2), that is, for every
there is with
for (2.1). The upper
bound comes from a first-moment count over all orientations of the complete
graph, which also proves that exists for every (p. 223). The paper
guesses that may hold for all ; the Szekeres--Szekeres
bound refutes that guess for every . The claim value is proved: the
result proves values and bounds of without determining its order of
magnitude.
Covers. The values and , the existence of , the lower bound and the upper bound for large ; not the order of magnitude, which the problem asks to estimate.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.
Acceptance. Refereed: published in The Mathematical Gazette, cited with
its venue above. The site credits Erdős with in
commentary on a problem it labels OPEN, which is not acceptance, so reviewed
is not listed.
Formalization. The repository jaredwilder/erdos902 (README author Jared
Wilder), linked above at its commit of 18 September 2026, contains files that
present themselves as formalizations of three results of this paper:
Erdos902ClosedForm.lean, the lower bound ;
Erdos902Control.lean, the values and checked by kernel
evaluation; and Erdos902Existence.lean, the first-moment existence bound, in
the weaker form . This project has not built or
audited the repository, so no formalized evidence is listed.