Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Let . For every there are infinitely many with
and infinitely many with : strings of consecutive primes whose successive gaps increase, or decrease. The case of the increasing runs is the question of Problem 6, answered yes. The theorem is in W. D. Banks, T. Freiberg and C. L. Turnage-Butterbaugh, Consecutive primes in tuples, Acta Arith. 167 (2015), no. 3, 261–266, first posted as arXiv:1311.7003 on 27 November 2013. The statement is Corollary 1 of the paper, digested on its library card, whose Corollary 2 also gives strings with each gap dividing the next. The input is the Maynard–Tao theorem that an admissible tuple of linear forms takes at least prime values at infinitely many arguments, in the form the paper states. In Maynard's paper, digested on its library card, the shift case is Proposition 4.2 together with the large- step of Section 4, which shows that every admissible -set with has at least primes among the for infinitely many ; the version for linear forms is an unnumbered remark of the introduction, and Theorem 1.1 itself is the bound deduced from that step. The paper's own contribution is to deduce that the primes can be taken consecutive, after which the choice of the tuple orders the gaps: consecutive primes have gaps , each larger than the sum of the earlier ones, and the tuple gives the decreasing runs. The question goes back to the closing questions of Erdős and Turán's 1948 paper, digested on its library card.
Acceptance. The paper is a refereed journal publication, the refereed
evidence; the publisher's record gives the year 2015 and the page is dated by
the preprint's first posting. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom, labels the
problem proved and credits the affirmative answer to this paper, the
reviewed evidence.
Formalization. The linked Lean file in Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs
repository, pinned at the commit in the link, declares itself a Lean
formalization of a solution to Problem 6, names the three authors above as
its informal authors, the formal-conjectures authors as statement authors,
and Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as its formal authors. Its theorem erdos_6
states that the set of with is infinite, the
analytic input being the Maynard–Tao theorem in the form the paper uses; a
text scan of that top file alone, not of the modules it imports (it imports
ErdosProblems.Erdos6.LargeExcess, which imports two further modules),
found no sorry, axiom, native_decide or admit token. The statement
file in google-deepmind/formal-conjectures states the question and the two
general runs with sorry, marked research solved, so it is not a
formalization link. The site's Lean qualification is matched by no proof
link on the problem page itself; this file is the only Lean proof of the
statement found. This corpus has not built or kernel-checked it, so no
formalized evidence is listed.
Depends on. Nothing beyond the cited paper.