Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. Let be the largest number of edges that lie in no monochromatic triangle, over all -colorings of the edges of . Keevash and Sudakov prove that
Problem 639, in its corrected Statement, asks whether every -coloring of the edges of leaves at most edges in no monochromatic triangle for large , the form in which Erdős stated the bound. The theorem proves it: the maximum is for every . The site's label PROVED (LEAN), the earlier unpublished large- result of Erdős, Rousseau and Schelp and Alon's deduction from Pyber's clique-covering theorem all concern the same statement, as the problem page records. The theorem's small values also refute the site's wording, which drops "for large ", at (, , and edges against , , and ); the problem page's Notes credit that refutation, which counts for nothing. The theorem is paged at Theorem 1.1 of the library's source card.
Argument. For there are -colorings of without a monochromatic triangle, so every edge counts. For the paper exhibits a coloring with such edges (a red -cycle with three edges from the sixth vertex to three consecutive cycle vertices) and reports a computer search showing that is the maximum. For a computer search shows that the colorings with one color class complete bipartite are extremal, and for the paper's Proposition 2.1 gives the upper bound from Turán's theorem and a case analysis on a triangle of uncovered edges, the complete bipartite coloring supplying the matching lower bound.
Depends on. Nothing in this wiki; the result is the paper's own theorem.
Dating. The page is dated 16 July 2003, the day the paper's Crossref record was created (the Crossref record, gives that creation date and no online date; OpenAlex gives the same day as the publication date). The journal posts an article online when it registers its DOI, and the journal's issue version, whose header reads "Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B 90 (2004) 41–53", prints a 2003 copyright line, so the first posting was in 2003 and not in the issue month, January 2004 (J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 90 (2004), no. 1); the publisher's own "available online" day could not be retrieved, so the paper link carries no date. The paper was received on 9 May 2002.
Acceptance. Reviewed: the site's curator, T. F. Bloom, credits the complete solution of the problem to Keevash and Sudakov's theorem in the problem's commentary, with the same three small values, and labels the problem PROVED (LEAN), a label that describes the corrected Statement (page accessed 2026-09-18); the thread's one comment concerns the formalization below and the proof-claim tab is empty. Refereed: J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 90 (2004), no. 1, 41--53. The acknowledgments credit Thomason and Scott with catching a mistake in an earlier draft, so the journal version is the one used. Semantic Scholar's ten citing records, scanned by title on 2026-09-18, include no dispute or correction.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos639.lean of
Boris Alexeev's repository plby/lean-proofs, linked above at the commit of
1 August 2026 that the formal-conjectures statement file for the problem
names in its formal_proof attribute (the problem page's Formalization
section describes that file), declares itself a formalization of a solution
to Problem 639: its header names Keevash and Sudakov as the informal
authors and, as formal authors, Aristotle, an automated proof system, and
the forum member who reported the development in the thread comment of 3
May 2026, linked above, with a Lean web-editor copy. The file defines the
graph of edges in no monochromatic triangle under a coloring and proves
theorem erdos639 (hn : 10 ≤ n V) : #(nimt C).edgeFinset ≤ n V ^ 2 / 4for every finite vertex type V with at least vertices, that is,
Proposition 2.1 of the paper: the bound for , which gives the
corrected Statement's bound for all sufficiently large . It formalizes
neither the exact values for nor the small- failures of the
site's wording. Two of its lemmas are marked as proved by Aristotle, and its
closing comment records #print axioms erdos639 as propext,
Classical.choice and Quot.sound. The file at the pinned commit (20,240
bytes) contains no sorry and no axiom line; nothing was built or audited
here and no statement-fidelity audit exists, so the file is a link and not
formalized evidence. It is the artifact behind the site's (Lean) suffix.
Read depth. Claims checked: Theorem 1.1, the paragraph before it, the small- paragraph and Proposition 2.1, printed pp. 42--44. The proof of Proposition 2.1 is checked for structure only, the computer searches for were not rerun, and nothing is independently reviewed in this corpus.