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 405 is yes, with the complete list. Yu and Liu prove that for an odd prime and positive integers the equation
holds only for , and , that is
The list is finite, so the question is answered; the finiteness itself, with an
effective bound on every solution, was proved earlier by Brindza and Erdős on
the claim page
Brindza and Erdős 1991,
and Yu and Liu's title calls their result the complete resolution of the
problem. The library holds no copy of the paper; the statement is taken from
the site's problem page and from the formal-conjectures record of the problem,
whose variant erdos_405.variants.yu_liu states the same three triples.
Formalization. The Lean file Erdos405.lean in Boris Alexeev's repository
of Lean proofs declares itself a formalization of a solution to the problem,
with Brindza, Erdős, Yu, Liu and Maohua Le as its informal authors and the AI
systems Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as its formal authors. Its theorem erdos_405
states that every solution with an odd prime is one of the three triples
above, the statement of this page, and its header credits the three triples
to Yu and Liu and to Le together. Le's paper, Publ. Math. Debrecen 48 (1996),
no. 1-2, 145--149, determines the same three solutions independently and is
recorded on
its own claim page;
the zbMATH review of the present paper (Zbl 0886.11018) notes Le's similar
result. The file was added on 2026-08-17 and the link pins the last commit
that touched it at its path; the file's text at that commit contains no
sorry. The formal-conjectures statement file names no formal
proof. This corpus has not built or audited the file, so the page lists no
formalized evidence.
Acceptance. The site's curator, T. F. Bloom, marks the problem proved and
credits this paper for the list of solutions, which the page lists as
reviewed. The paper is K. Yu and D. Liu, A complete resolution of a problem
of Erdős and Graham, Rocky Mountain J. Math. 26 (1996), no. 3, 1235--1244, a
refereed journal, listed as refereed. The page is dated by the publisher's
record, which gives 1996-09-01 for the issue.