Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
The claim. There are a real and an integer such that for every , every abelian group of order and every with , is the sum of a nonempty subset of . Applied to this is the statement of Problem 540 for , and one constant serves every : for any makes , so only , which contains , qualifies (a one-line remark made on the problem page). The theorem thus settles the problem in the affirmative. E. Szemerédi, On a conjecture of Erdős and Heilbronn, Acta Arith. 17 (1970), no. 3, 227--229, received 15 May 1969 (the date this page is named by, the earliest dated record of the claim); the Theorem on p. 227, paged as the Theorem of Szemerédi (1970). The proof (pp. 228--229) is a two-page combinatorial argument by contradiction through a matrix of subset sums and a chain-counting alternative; this page records its structure, not a check of each step. The paper leaves the constant unspecified and records that the sharper conjecture with and the non-abelian question are undecided; the constant is now by Hamidoune and Zémor (1996) and exact for primes by Balandraud (2012), refinements with their own claim pages, Hamidoune and Zémor (1996) and Balandraud (2012).
Acceptance. Refereed: the journal publication cited above. Reviewed: the
site's curator, Thomas Bloom, who is independent of the author, accepts the
theorem as the proof of the conjecture of Erdős and Heilbronn, with the label
PROVED (LEAN) and a commentary attributing the general case to this paper and
the prime case to Olson (1968); Erdős acknowledged the proof in his 1973 survey
and, with Graham, in the 1980 monograph. The formalization link is the external
Lean file that the formal-conjectures statement names as its proof, at the
repository head of 15 September 2026; it names Szemerédi as the informal author
and the prover Aristotle (Harmonic) and Matteo Del Vecchio as the formal
authors, proves the problem's statement with the constant with the axiom
closure its closing comment records as propext, Classical.choice and
Quot.sound; the corpus has not built or independently audited it, so it is not
acceptance evidence.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki: the theorem is proved within the paper, whose card is linked above.