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 728 is yes, and much more: the set of integers such that
has asymptotic density one. This is Theorem 2 of Carl Pomerance, Remarks on the middle binomial coefficient, Integers 26 (2026), #A47, carded at Pomerance 2026 (received 2026-01-15, published 2026-04-03). With , and the divisibility reads and , so for any such and any between and the triple has for every , once is large, and . Every is covered, and the gap may be taken as large as ; the paper remarks that may be replaced by any constant below . The paper's Theorem 1 is the stronger divisibility , for almost all and every with ; the note remarks, without proof, that is optimal, and Proposition 1 in the appendix of Sothanaphan's writeup (on the claim page Barreto 2026) proves that sharpness. The paper itself states its theorems as results on the middle binomial coefficient and says they may be of interest for the recent AI work on an Erdős problem; the translation to the problem's statement is the change of variables above, which is this page's own step and is not formalized.
The argument. The method is the one of Pomerance's earlier paper Pomerance 2015 (Amer. Math. Monthly 122 (2015)), which proved that for almost all at each fixed : Kummer's theorem turns into a carry count in base , binomial-distribution estimates show that almost every has many carries for every prime up to the relevant range (the note's Lemma 1 bounds the normalized carry count for almost all : , by counting base-3 carries inside base-27 digits, and for because each base- digit at least forces a carry; for Theorem 2 its Lemma 4 gives more than carries, where is the number of base- digits), the elementary bound controls the other side, and the exceptional are counted away. The note extends the 2015 method and was written after a participant in the Problem 729 thread asked Pomerance, on 2026-01-10, about the AI-generated proof on the claim page Barreto 2026; the reply relayed on 2026-01-11 was that the ideas of the 2015 paper give the result and that no printed source was known. Only the 2015 method came before the AI-generated proof, and Sothanaphan's writeup of that proof records the two arguments as very similar. A first version of the note, titled A remark on the middle binomial coefficient, was announced in the site's thread on 2026-01-14, the date of this page; a gap in its Lemma 2.1 (the carry frequency for ) was pointed out in the thread on 2026-01-23 and repaired in the revision of 2026-01-27 linked above, whose constants the published paper keeps.
Formalization. The Lean file Erdos728p.lean in Boris Alexeev's
repository of formalized Erdős problems, linked above at the pinned commits
of its two Lean versions, formalizes Pomerance's density theorems: the
theorems of both versions state that the bad sets for Theorems 1 and 2 of the
note have density zero, named theorem_1_1 and theorem_1_2 in the older
version and erdos_728 and erdos_728_intrinsic in the current one. The
current version carries the header naming Pomerance as the informal author
and Aristotle and Alexeev as the formal authors, and the formal-conjectures
statement file for the problem names this file as the problem's formal proof.
Neither version quantifies over the problem's triples ; the step
from Theorem 2 to them is the change of variables above, which is not
formalized. The file was announced in the thread on 2026-01-22
and, as that announcement says, its production fed back into the note's
constants. This corpus has not built or audited it, so the page lists no
formalized evidence.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.
Acceptance. The paper appeared in Integers, a refereed journal, which the
page lists as refereed; its acknowledgments thank four mathematicians for
comments and for pointing out errors. The site's curator credits Barreto and
ChatGPT-5.2 for the problem's resolution and does not mention this paper, so
no reviewed evidence is listed.