Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For let be the increasing sequence of the sums with digits . Theorem IV of Erdős and Komornik (p. 59) is printed as "If and if is different from the square root of the second Pisot number, then for every ". With the sequence is the ordered set of finite sums of distinct powers of in Problem 1096, so for every in except possibly , where is the second Pisot number (the site's ). Since and , every in is covered, and the problem's question, whether some makes the gaps tend to for every , has the answer yes with . The introduction (p. 57) cites the question as Problem 4 of the 1990 Bulletin paper of Erdős, Joó and Komornik and says that one purpose of the paper is to answer it affirmatively; Remark (a) after the theorem says the property probably holds at as well. The theorem is compiled on the result page theorem_iv; the digest is on the card erdos_komornik_1998_developments_non_integer_bases.
Argument, in outline. The proof (pp. 77--78) applies the paper's Lemma 3.2, which turns a finite accumulation point of the difference set of one digit pattern, and bounded gaps of two others, into gaps tending to for their sum. For with not Pisot, the pattern of even powers is the sequence for , whose difference set has a finite accumulation point by Theorem I (b) because , while the patterns on the exponents and have bounded gaps by Lemma 3.1, which needs ; for , the smallest Pisot number, the same runs with period through , which is not Pisot. Only is left out. The proof's reductions are checked; Theorem I (b) and the two lemmas are not checked. The result page records one filing observation: the first case is written for while the theorem allows equality, where the same argument applies.
Lean. The file Erdos1096.lean in Boris Alexeev's repository, at the
commit linked above (30 August 2026), names Erdős and Komornik as the
informal authors and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as the formal authors, and
proves erdos_1096, the right-hand side of the formal-conjectures
statement, with , from three lemmas of a companion
module (small differences in the spectrum of for , eventual
right-density of the spectrum of , and gaps tending to zero from that
density), the route through that this paper and Feng's share. It is
the qualifier of the site's label PROVED (LEAN) and is linked here as the
formalization of
this claim; the formal-conjectures statement file credits Erdős and
Komornik and leaves its theorem at sorry, and is not a formalization. This
corpus has not built or audited the development, so no formalized
evidence is listed. The same answer follows independently on
Feng's page.
Acceptance. Refereed: P. Erdős and V. Komornik, Developments in non-integer bases, Acta Math. Hungar. 79 (1998), no. 1--2, 57--83, received 30 September 1996; the publisher's record dates the issue to April 1998 without a day, and the page is named by the first of that month. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, labels the problem proved and credits this paper, in the problem's commentary and in the thread of 16 April 2026, with the first resolution, for ; the curator neither wrote nor submitted the result. Feng's 2016 paper cites it as its reference [9]. The site's range is the printed range's part below the excluded point. Nothing here is independently reviewed by this project.
Depends on. Nothing on the wiki; the theorem is proved in the refereed paper linked above.