Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. For every with there is a constant such that the eventual-time thresholds of the Legendre-symbol partial sums have mean value over the primes: as , where is the least such that for every . The proof ends with the quantitative form and identifies , where is the limiting frequency of the primes with . Since , this is the asymptotic asked by Problem 981, Erdős's display (80) of 1965, with the two-sided threshold in place of the one-sided threshold of Erdős and of the problem's statement, and with because every . The theorem is quoted from the printed page on the result page theorem_p165; the digest is on the source card elliott_1969_conjecture_erdos_concerning_character_sums.
The one-sided threshold. The paper opens with Erdős's one-sided threshold and the conjecture as its display (1), notes , the least quadratic nonresidue, and then proves the theorem for the two-sided , saying of the original definition only that simple changes in the argument give a similar result (p. 164); no adaptation is printed. Termwise , which does not by itself transfer the asymptotic. The problem's wording, the one-sided form, therefore rests on the printed theorem together with the author's remark, as the problem page's Status records. For the one-sided form is settled without this paper: the problem page's Formulation shows that for both thresholds equal for every odd prime, and records the identity that makes the instance Erdős's theorem (78) under its Origin.
Argument, in outline. The primes whose two-sided sums reach for some are few by a fourth-moment large-sieve bound (Lemma 7); for the rest, is decided by the symbols for , so by the residue of modulo , and with the Siegel--Walfisz theorem gives each its limiting frequency . The proof was not checked here beyond this outline.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.
Acceptance. Refereed: P. D. T. A. Elliott, A conjecture of Erdős concerning character sums, Indagationes Mathematicae (Proceedings) 72 (1969), no. 2, 164--171 (Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. Proc. Ser. A 72 = Indag. Math. 31), communicated by N. G. de Bruijn at the meeting of 25 January 1969, the date this page is named by. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, marks the problem PROVED and credits the proof to this paper in the problem's commentary (page last edited 27 December 2025); the curator neither wrote nor submitted the result. Independently of the site, Tang and Zhang, who found the paper while writing on the first-passage variant, restate Erdős's (80) as their Conjecture 1.1 and write that Elliott proved it (arXiv:2512.24631v2, p. 2; card tang_2025_average_first_passage_times_character_sums), and the site's thread of 27 December 2025 records the same reading. Not formalized: no Lean statement of the problem exists, and nothing was built or audited here. The one-sided qualification above is disclosed and is not a dispute; no dispute of the theorem was found in the searches dated on the problem page.