Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. There is an infinite sequence of positive integers with
where counts the whose fraction in lowest terms has a denominator different from every earlier . This answers Problem 1000 yes, against the expectation Erdős recorded in 1964, when he could show only that cannot tend to zero and that a zero lower limit forces an upper limit of one. Cassels had shown in 1950 that the lower limit of the average can be zero for his count, which excludes every whose reduced denominator divides an earlier term (card cassels_1950); the question asks for the full limit. The result is in J. A. Haight, Metric Diophantine Approximation and Related Topics, PhD thesis, University of London, Westfield College, dated February 1971 on its title page (the catalog's entry [Ha] gives no year). The site's thread describes the construction as Cassels's construction combined with a multiplication of the sequence, and the Lean file below builds the sequence from blocks of multiples of a large prime by the divisors of a primorial.
The claim is stated in the site's count, which never falls below Cassels's, the count of Erdős's question [Er64b, p. 59], so it also answers that question. The thread's account rests on the average being unchanged when a sequence is multiplied by a constant, which holds for Cassels's count but not for the site's (for the sequence the second ratio is under both counts; for it is under Cassels's and under the site's); the site's version is the one the Lean file below proves, by its own construction.
Acceptance. The reviewed evidence is the documented acceptance by the
catalog erdosproblems.com, whose page carries the label PROVED (LEAN), last
edited 2025-12-05, and whose curator, Thomas Bloom, credits Haight with the
proof that such a sequence exists. The thread (second discussion link)
carries the posts of 2025-12-04 that identified the thesis (its Chapter 2)
as the solution, said that Erdős mentions the solution on p. 5 of his 1975
paper Problems and results on diophantine approximations (II), and noted
that ChatGPT helped locate the reference. No refereed journal
version is known; the thesis is a doctoral dissertation, and no refereed
evidence is listed.
Formalization. A third party formalized the solution: thm_main in
src/v4.29.1/ErdosProblems/Erdos1000.lean of
https://github.com/plby/lean-proofs, pinned above at the commit of
2026-06-24, the file's version of that date (the proof entered the
repository on 2025-12-28). The file declares itself a formalization of a
solution to the problem, names Haight and ChatGPT as informal
authors and Aristotle and Boris Alexeev as formal authors,
so it is a link on this page rather than an independent claim. Its theorem
gives a strictly increasing with
, with defined by the
problem's condition ; it imports only Mathlib and
contains no sorry. The formal-conjectures catalog (the record link,
pinned to the commit of 2026-09-18 that last touched its file) tags its own
statement erdos_1000 as research solved and cites this file as the
formal proof; its definition uses non-divisibility
, Cassels's count, to which the catalog corrected
its earlier inequality on 2026-09-13; since that count never exceeds the
site's, the linked proof of the site's version implies the catalog's
statement. This repository has not built the file, printed its axioms or
audited its definitions against the problem, so the claim carries no
formalized evidence and the site's "(LEAN)" qualifier is reported, not
warranted, here.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.