Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. In the letters of Problem 1079: a graph on vertices with at least edges, , either is the Turán graph or has a vertex of degree whose neighborhood contains at least edges. This is the Theorem (p. 111) of B. Bollobás and A. Thomason, Dense neighbourhoods and Turán's theorem, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 31 (1981), no. 1, 111--114, which writes for the number of parts of the Turán graph, one less than the problem's , and for its number of edges. It answers the question yes for every with an explicit constant (about at ), with one qualification recorded on the result page: the printed proof gives this explicit constant for in the problem's indexing, where its last inequality holds (with equality at the threshold, the step before it being strict), and for every some positive , since the vertex found lies in a triangle, which is all the question needs. The Turán graph itself meets the site's conclusion with equality, since the neighborhood of any of its vertices induces with exactly edges and , and every other graph has the vertex with the "" of Erdős's own wording. Erdős asked for graphs with edges and a star spanning at least edges; such a graph is not the Turán graph, so the theorem answers that formulation too, and with it the neighborhood contains a and the graph a , the generalization of Turán's theorem Erdős had in mind. The paper attributes the conjecture to Erdős's 1975 survey. The proof (pp. 112--114) counts triangles against the degree sequence, with equality exactly for complete multipartite graphs.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos1079.lean of
Boris Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs, linked above at the commit of
15 September 2026 that formal-conjectures cites (the file was first added on
2026-08-17), declares itself a Lean formalization of a solution to Problem
1079 and names Béla Bollobás and Andrew Thomason as its informal authors and
Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as its formal authors, so it is a link on this page
and not an independent claim. Under the toolchain Lean v4.33.0 it proves
erdos_problem_1079: for , and a graph on vertices with
at least edges, some vertex of maximum degree has
and at least edges in its
neighborhood; it does not except the Turán graph, since a maximum-degree
vertex always meets the non-strict conclusion (the Bondy claim page). It also
proves erdos_1079, the strict form above the threshold, which the
formal-conjectures statement file ErdosProblems/1079.lean names as the
formal_proof of its variant erdos_1079.variants.bondy. The file carries
no sorry and prints the axioms of both theorems. The corpus has not
built or audited it, so it gives no formalized evidence.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the argument is self-contained.
Acceptance. Refereed: Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B (the Crossref record: volume 31, issue 1, pp. 111--114, issued August 1981; the day is the issue's nominal first day, used for this page's date). Reviewed: the site's curator, T. F. Bloom, labels the problem solved and names this paper as the proof, and Bondy restates the theorem as a known result in his refereed note of 1983 (Theorem 1), crediting it also to an independent proof by Erdős and Sós in a preprint, which is not a source of this page. The source card cites the publication, describes the publisher's open-archive version and holds no file; it records four observations on the printed proof. Nothing is independently reviewed. The acceptance recorded here rests on the publication, the restatement and the site's acceptance, not on a local review. The site labels the problem SOLVED; since the result is an affirmative proof, the claim value here is proved, and the problem page's Status sentence keeps the site's label. Bondy's own strengthening has the page Bondy.