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 1036 is yes: for every there is such that, for all sufficiently large , every graph on vertices with no complete and no empty induced subgraph on more than vertices has at least pairwise non-isomorphic induced subgraphs. The claimed result is Theorem 1.3 of S. Shelah, Erdős and Rényi conjecture, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 82 (1998), no. 2, 179--185, DOI 10.1006/jcta.1997.2845 (Crossref record accessed; issued May 1998, whose nominal first day the paper link carries): for every there is such that, for large enough, a graph on vertices with neither a complete subgraph nor an edgeless subgraph on at least vertices has , where is the number of induced subgraphs of up to isomorphism (Definition 1.2) and is the base-two logarithm (Notation 1.1), a convention that changes by a constant factor only. The theorem's printed hypothesis reads "a graph with edges [sic]" in the arXiv version (card); the abstract, the conjecture as stated in the introduction and the proof concern a graph with vertices, and the claim recorded here is the vertex form. The site's "more than " and the theorem's "at least " differ by the choice of constant. The paper names the statement as a conjecture of Erdős and Rényi and records the earlier bounds: Alon and Hajnal's with the largest trivial subgraph, which for gives (the introduction prints , a slip: the bound weakens as grows) (card), and the parallel theorem with the bipartite Ramsey function in place of the trivial-subgraph size, which the introduction credits to Erdős and Rényi; it is Theorem 2 of Erdős and Hajnal [ErHa89b] (card), as the site and Erdős's 1993 survey (card, Chapter V, problem 14) credit it: for and , if neither nor its complement contains , then has at least pairwise non-isomorphic induced subgraphs for all large ; it has its own partial claim page, Erdős and Hajnal. Remark 1.4 blows up each vertex of a Ramsey graph into vertices, giving , and conjectures that this is the worst case.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.
Formalization. The file src/v4.29.1/ErdosProblems/Erdos1036.lean of
Boris Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs (Lean v4.29.1 with Mathlib
v4.29.1; 3,916 lines at the pinned commit of 2026-09-15, linked above),
announced in the site's forum on 21 January 2026, declares itself a
formalization of this result: its header names Shelah as the informal
author and the automated prover Aristotle and Alexeev as formal authors,
and its opening comment says that it formalizes the main theorem of the
paper. Its final theorem erdos_1036 states that for every real
there are and such that every finite simple graph on
vertices whose clique number and independence number are both at
most (hom_num) has at least vertex subsets
up to isomorphism of the induced graphs (I_num), the statement of the
problem with the base of the logarithm rescaling ; a comment after
#print axioms erdos_1036 reports the axioms propext, choice and
Quot.sound, and the file contains no sorry, axiom, native_decide or
unsafe. The repository's note ErdosProblems/Erdos1036.md (the
record link) lists copies for five toolchains (Lean v4.24.0 to v4.33.0).
Nothing was built, replayed or audited here, and the fidelity of its
statement to the question was not independently
reviewed by this project, so the page lists no formalized evidence.
Acceptance. Refereed publication in the Journal of Combinatorial
Theory, Series A, cited with its venue above, the refereed evidence. The
reviewed evidence is the site's documented acceptance: the site's
curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the problem PROVED (LEAN) and credits Shelah
[Sh98] with the proof in the commentary, revised after the forum comment of
13 September 2025 pointed to the paper, which Bloom acknowledged the same
day (Bloom took no part in the paper); the proof-claim tab is empty, and
the community database records "proved (Lean)". This page's date is the
arXiv posting of 15 July 1997 (arXiv record accessed; the
manuscript's own revision date is 14 August 1997). The paper is also posted
as paper 627 in Shelah's archive
(the second preprint link). Read depth here: the abstract, Notation 1.1,
Definition 1.2, Theorem 1.3 and Remark 1.4 of the arXiv version; the proof
was not read, and nothing is independently reviewed by this project.