Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Halász [Ha73] answers the question of Salem and Zygmund, which Hayman's collection poses for power polynomials as Problem 4.17, by proving that the normalized maximum of a random sign polynomial has an almost-sure limit, and that the limit is Salem and Zygmund's upper constant. His theorem is stated for the cosine polynomial with independent uniform signs: with probability one, for all sufficiently large ,
The introduction says that the theorem also holds for power polynomials, and the closing paragraph gives the transfer: the lower bound holds for on because is the real part of , and the upper bound follows by applying the argument to the real parts of finitely many fixed rotations of . Hence the unit-circle maximum divided by tends almost surely to , which answers Problem 523 yes with ; the shift from Halász's terms indexed from to the problem's terms indexed from changes nothing, since . The proof treats the lower bound first, through a smooth cutoff written as a Fourier–Stieltjes transform, sums over equally spaced points and Chebyshev's inequality; the source card digests the paper. The page's date is the day the paper was received by the journal, 1973-04-20, as its last page records.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the result rests on the refereed paper linked above.
Acceptance. Refereed: the paper appeared in Studia Scientiarum
Mathematicarum Hungarica 8 (1973), 369–377, in the volume whose repository scan
the paper link names. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, records the
problem as settled by Halász with in the problem's commentary (page last
edited 01 February 2026). The theorem and extension statements are checked
against the paper; the finite-rotation step for the upper bound of the power
polynomial is the paper's statement, not compiled in this wiki. Formalization: a
Lean 4 file in the lean-proofs repository, linked above at its pinned commit,
declares itself a formalization of Halász's solution, names Codex and GPT-5.6
Sol as its formal authors, and proves erdos_523: on the product space of
independent uniform signs, almost surely the maximum modulus divided by
tends to ; the file prints the axioms of erdos_523 after
the theorem. This corpus has neither built that development nor audited its
statement, so no formalized evidence is listed.