Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The answer to Problem 1009 is yes: for every there is such that every graph on vertices with at least edges, , has at least edge-disjoint triangles. The claimed result is Theorem 1 of E. Győri, On the number of edge-disjoint triangles in graphs of given size, Combinatorics (Eger, 1987), Colloq. Math. Soc. János Bolyai 52, North-Holland, Amsterdam (1988), 267--276, as a refereed later paper states it: a graph with vertices and edges, where and , has at least edge-disjoint triangles (Blumenthal, Lidický, Pehova, Pfender, Pikhurko and Volec, Combin. Probab. Comput. 30 (2021), 271--287, in the proof of its Lemma 11, p. 8 of the arXiv copy; the corpus's card is blumenthal_2021_sharp_bounds_decomposing_graphs_edges_triangles). The site adds, as its reading of the paper, that the theorem gives $f(c)\ll c^2f(c)=0$) when is odd and , or when is even and . The no-loss sentence is a statement for large in terms of : Section 5 of the 2021 paper states Győri's ranges, for odd and for even , "for large ", cites a correction, and calls the two bounds sharp, and the paper of Balogh and Wigal (Combinatorica 2025, read in arXiv:2502.16683v2, p. 10; card) reports the same ranges and points to Győri's 1992 correction of the paper; as a statement for every it fails for , and Sauer's graph on ten vertices, as the problem page checks. The step from the attested theorem to the question is an authored conversion on the problem page: with , and taken from the theorem, and give at least triangles, and for smaller the trivial bound suffices, so answers the question. Whether holds for every depends on constants not visible in the attestation. Erdős's own theorem ([Er71], item 3) is the case with , and Sauer's example there shows .
Acceptance. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem proved
and credits Győri [Gy88] with the proof (the reviewed evidence; Bloom took
no part in the paper), after the forum comments of 21 and 29 October 2025
identified Theorem 1 and corrected the deduction; the proof-claim tab is
empty; the community database records the problem proved, with its last
update dated 31 October 2025. The paper appeared in a proceedings volume
(Colloq. Math. Soc. János Bolyai 52, 1988, whose year gives this page's
nominal date; the zbMATH record Zbl 0706.05029 identifies the volume and
carries a review summarizing the result as $ed_3(n,\lfloor
n^2/4\rfloor+t)=t-o(t)$); no evidence that the volume was refereed is in
hand, so refereed is not listed. The theorem is attested by the refereed
quotation above, and the 2021 paper (p. 8, its [13, Theorem 1]) and Balogh
and Wigal (Theorem 1.6, p. 2, their [8]) attribute to Győri's journal paper,
Combinatorica 11 (1991), 231--243, the generalization to -cliques,
, whose case is this theorem; that paper is not held and is
known by attestation only, so it is not listed as the claimant's refereed
publication either. Balogh and Wigal's correction reference [9] (p. 10)
concerns the 1988 paper's exact ranges. The thread's second comment doubts
the quantified restatement in the 2021 paper (the form with $\varepsilon
k^2/n^2$); the claim recorded on this page uses only the first sentence of
the attestation, with a fixed implied constant. Read depth: the attestation
was read clause by clause; nothing of Győri's text, constants or range of
was read, and nothing is independently reviewed by this project. The
acceptance rests on the curator's credit, supported by the refereed
attestation, and is to be rechecked against a readable copy of [Gy88] when
one becomes available.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos1009.lean of Boris
Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs (2,373 lines at the pinned commit of
2026-09-15, linked above; first committed 17 August 2026; headed
leanprover/lean4:v4.33.0 mathlib v4.33.0; it imports Mathlib modules and two
sibling developments of the repository, ErdosProblems.Erdos207.Prefix and
ErdosProblems.Erdos127.CutComposition) declares itself "a Lean formalization
of a solution to Erdős Problem 1009" and names E. Győri as informal author and
Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors. Its theorem erdos_1009 (line 2347)
states: for every real there is a natural such that for all ,
and every SimpleGraph (Fin n) with at least edges and , there
is a family of triangles of the graph, pairwise edge-disjoint in the file's
encoding (TriangleFamilyOn, IsTrianglePacking), with ; its
docstring gives the explicit choice for any natural . The
file has no sorry, axiom or native_decide. The formal-conjectures
statement of the problem (added 19 September 2026, described on the problem
page) names this line in its formal_proof attribute; its packings are finite
sets of -cliques pairwise sharing at most one vertex, a different encoding,
and the bridge between the two is in neither file. The file is not built,
audited or kernel-checked in this corpus, and no outside examination of it is
published, so the page lists no formalized evidence; the repository also
carries an account of the proof (tex/1009.tex), which this page does not
cover.