Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The number
with the sum of the divisors of , is irrational:
the case of Problem 252. Erdős
posed it as Problem 4493 in the problem section of the American Mathematical
Monthly, volume 59 (1952), p. 412 (the first paper link is the Monthly's
problems item on that page), and the published solution is J. B. Kelly's,
volume 60 (1953), no. 8, p. 557 (the second link). Erdős's 1957 paper
(remark on p. 213,
footnote 2) attributes the case to Kelly's solution and the case
to Breusch's, and Pratt's 2022 paper (its references [9] and [11]) identifies
the solutions of Problems 4493 and 4518 as the sources of the two cases; the
site's remarks credit Erdős with both cases under its key [Er52], Erdős's 1988
survey writes that he and Kac proved them, and Friedlander, Luca and Stoiciu
attribute both to Problem 4518. The Monthly items are paywalled and not held
in the library, so the published argument is recorded by these attributions.
formal-conjectures tags its variant erdos_252.variants.k_eq_one research
solved, citing the 1974 paper of Erdős and Straus, whose general theorems give
the same case on
their own claim page.
Covers. The case only: is irrational. Nothing about any ; the case is Erdős and Kac's.
Acceptance. Refereed: the American Mathematical Monthly, volume 60, issue
8 (October 1953), p. 557, carries Kelly's solution of Problem 4493; the
Crossref record of the DOI gives these data. The site labels the problem
OPEN, so its curator's remark crediting Erdős with the cases and
is commentary on an open problem and not acceptance, and no reviewed
evidence is listed. The proof is not checked here.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.