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Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.

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Claim. Yu. V. Nesterenko, Modular functions and transcendence questions, Mat. Sb. 187 (1996), no. 9, 65–96 (Russian); English translation Sb. Math. 187 (1996), no. 9, 1319–1348. Theorem 1 (p. 66 of the Russian original) states that for every complex qq with 0<∣q∣<10<|q|<1 at least three of the four numbers qq, P(q)P(q), Q(q)Q(q), R(q)R(q) are algebraically independent over Q\mathbb{Q}, where P,Q,RP,Q,R are Ramanujan's functions, with P(z)=1−24∑n≥1σ(n)znP(z)=1-24\sum_{n\ge1}\sigma(n)z^n. Corollary 2 (pp. 66–67) draws the consequence for algebraic qq: P(q)P(q), Q(q)Q(q), R(q)R(q) are algebraically independent, in particular transcendental. At q=1/2q=1/2,

P(1/2)=1−24∑n=1∞σ(n)2n,P(1/2)=1-24\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{\sigma(n)}{2^n},

so the series of Problem 250 is transcendental and therefore irrational: the answer to the question is yes, with more than it asks. The result pages Theorem 1 and Corollary 2 and the source card hold the statements from the Russian original; the proof is recorded by statement and pointer only. The site's reference [Ne96] is the announcement of the same theorem in C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Sér. I Math. 322 (1996), no. 10, 909–914 (the second record link, its zbMATH entry Zbl 0859.11047), of which the library holds no copy. The irrationality alone had been proved a few months earlier by Duverney, on his own claim page.

Acceptance. Refereed: Matematicheskii Sbornik, volume 187, number 9 (1996), received by the editors on 7 March 1996, with the English translation in Sbornik: Mathematics. Reviewed: Thomas Bloom, the site's curator, credits this theorem with the answer in the problem's remarks and labels the problem proved (page last edited 28 September 2025, as of 2026-09-17); zbMATH reviews the paper (Zbl 0898.11031, reviewer J. Wolfart) and the announcement (Zbl 0859.11047) without objection; the theorem was the subject of Waldschmidt's Bourbaki exposé of November 1996 (Astérisque 245 (1997), 105–140, whose Théorème 4 restates it) and of a chapter of Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1752 (2001), and Nesterenko received the 1997 Ostrowski Prize. The formal-conjectures statement for the problem cites this paper and is tagged research solved (250.lean). This corpus has not reproved the theorem and awards no tier of its own. The formalization link is a public Lean 4 proof of the problem's statement in Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs repository (file of 2026-08-15, pinned to the commit of 2026-09-15), whose header names Nesterenko as the informal author and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as the formal authors; its route differs from Nesterenko's, building nonzero integer linear forms in the value that tend to zero, formal-conjectures cites it as the formal proof of its statement, and it is not part of this repository's audited Lean, so it gives no formalized evidence.

Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the claim is the cited paper's theorem.

The page name carries the date on which the editors received the paper, the earliest date the paper states; the announcement's dates of receipt and publication are not stated in the records cited above.