Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The site's wording of
Problem 998 is false: for
, and , the count
differs from by at most
for every , while is rational and so not of the form for
any integer . The proof is the Lean development in Boris Alexeev's
repository of formalized Erdős problems, added on 2026-08-17 and linked above
at the commit of 2026-08-24 that last touched the file. Its theorem
not_erdos_998 is the negation of the universal statement: it is not the case
that for every irrational and every satisfying the
eventual condition (HasBoundedRemainder), both and are
fractional parts of integer multiples of . The bound comes from a
telescoping fractional-part identity for a translate of an interval of length
, the mechanism of Ostrowski's 1927 estimate; the file imports
only Mathlib, contains no sorry and prints the theorem's axioms. Its module
comment says that the endpoint formulation copied into the problem is false
and that Kesten's theorem characterizes bounded-remainder intervals by their
length.
Claimant and standing. The file's header names Harry Kesten as informal
author and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors. Kesten's paper proves the
length criterion and states no such counterexample, so the development is
recorded as its own result, under the repository owner's slug, rather than as
a formalization of a published claim; the
Kesten page records
Kesten's Theorem 4, which proves the corrected Statement. The page is
rejected because it answers the site's wording, the endpoint converse Erdős
printed in 1964, not the corrected Statement, which asks only that the length
be a fractional multiple of ; the result itself is not in
question and is credited in the problem page's Notes. The site (accessed 2026-09-04) labels
the problem PROVED and does not mention the development, the community
database at teorth/erdosproblems lists the problem as not formalized, no
outside reviewer has examined the file, and this corpus has not built or
audited it, so it carries no formalized evidence.
Depends on. No page of this wiki.