Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Rudolf Ahlswede and Levon H. Khachatrian prove, in The complete intersection theorem for systems of finite sets (card), the -conjecture of Erdős, Ko and Rado: a family of -element subsets of a -element set in which every two members share at least two elements has at most members, the size of the family of all -subsets containing at least elements of a fixed -subset. With this is the statement of Problem 83, and the extremal family shows the bound is sharp. The paper proves it twice: directly, in its section 4, by comparing a maximal family with its complemented family, and as the case , , of its main Theorem, which determines for all the maximum size of a -intersecting family of -subsets of an -set as the largest of the families , proving Frankl's general conjecture and identifying the extremal families up to permutation. The method works with generating sets of left-compressed families. The conjecture goes back to the 1961 paper of Erdős, Ko and Rado (card), whose Theorem 2 covers the range ; the paper records that Erdős called the -conjecture the last open problem from that paper.
Acceptance. Refereed: European J. Combin. 18 (1997), no. 2, 125–136;
the publisher's record dates the issue February 1997 without a day, and the
page's date is the first of that month. Reviewed: Thomas Bloom, the site's
curator, marks the problem proved and credits the proof to Ahlswede and
Khachatrian [AhKh97]. The site's label adds a Lean qualification. The
formal-conjectures statement file for the problem states the bound, leaves
its proof as sorry and points, through its formal_proof attribute, at the
Lean file in Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs collection linked above at its
pinned commit, which declares itself a formalization of Ahlswede and
Khachatrian's solution with Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol as formal authors. This
corpus has not built or audited that file, so the page lists no formalized
evidence. The library card records the statements and does not verify the
proofs; it is not acceptance evidence.