Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. J. L. Leonard, On a conjecture of Bollobás and Erdős, Period. Math. Hungar. 3 (1973), no. 3--4, 281--284, exhibits a graph with points and edges in which no two points are joined by five internally disjoint paths (pp. 281--282). Since and , this is the question of Problem 915 at , under the vertex-disjoint reading, and the answer there is no. The paper goes on (pp. 282--283) to build, for every integer , graphs with points and more than edges and no such pair, so the threshold is not plus a constant. Leonard writes that he suspects the edge-disjoint form of the conjecture to be true, and his earlier paper of 1972 had proved it at .
The page targets the vertex-disjoint reading of the question, under which the statement is asserted for every and ; the counterexample refutes it at , and hence as a whole, so the claim is a full disproof. The edge-disjoint reading, under which the conjecture is true for every by Mader's theorem, is recorded as a variant on Mader's claim page. The disproof for every , with the exact value of , is Sørensen and Thomassen's.
Acceptance. Refereed: Periodica Mathematica Hungarica (volume 3, issue 3--4, pp. 281--284, issued September 1973 by its Crossref record, accessed 2026-10-07; the day is the issue's nominal first day, used for this page's date). Reviewed: the site's curator (T. F. Bloom), independent of the author, credits the paper with the disproof at in the problem's commentary, and Sørensen and Thomassen report the counterexample in the introduction of their 1974 paper (p. 143). The source has a library source card. Read depth: the counterexample and the bound; the constructions are followed, and the clique and path checks are not checked. The acceptance rests on the publication and the site's acceptance; nothing is independently reviewed by this project.