Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. The answer is yes for a finite ground set. Theorem 1.1 of the preprint A proof of Chvátal's conjecture via a sharp correlation inequality states that if is closed under subsets and is intersecting, then for some , where is the star of the members containing : the corrected Statement of Problem 701, Chvátal's conjecture of 1972, for subsets of the ground set . The proof goes through the correlation formulation of Friedgut, Kahn, Kalai and Keller: for increasing Boolean functions on with antipodal, (Corollary 1.3), which those authors had shown equivalent to the conjecture. The preprint derives it from a sharp inequality (Theorem 1.2) bounding by the harmonic mean of and , the dual of , with equality when is the product of all coordinates; the inequality follows from a one-parameter family of bounds (Theorem 1.4), optimized over the parameter and proved by Bessel's inequality against monomials supported on the family. Section 5 draws further consequences, among them the -valued cases of three conjectures of Friedgut, Kahn, Kalai and Keller, which the later preprints of Keevash and of Ellis, Filmus and Friedgut describe as Kleitman's conjecture and a Boolean version of Kahn's conjecture.
Submission note. Posted to erdosproblems.com as a proof claim by Fan Chang, Hong Liu, Miao Liu (account BorisAlexeev) on 30 September 2026, giving "ChatGPT" as the AI used:
Fan Chang, Hong Liu, and Miao Liu resolved Chvátal's conjecture as a corollary of more general results such as Kleitman's conjecture and a version of Kahn's conjecture. The result was formalized by Boon Suan Ho. See also the paper "Chvátal's conjecture: a proof from The Book" by David Ellis, Yuval Filmus, and Ehud Friedgut. And also "On Kahn's flow conjecture" by Peter Keevash.
The Palomar registry's description of entry PALOMAR-2026-09-17-000004:
A Lean 4 + mathlib formalization of Fan Chang, Hong Liu, and Miao Liu's paper "A proof of Chvátal's conjecture via a sharp correlation inequality" (arXiv:2609.19123v1). It formalizes their star theorem for hereditary set families, sharp Boolean Fourier correlation inequality, antipodal corollary, sharpness results, and weighted strengthening. The formalization was completely prepared by GPT-6.
Formulation. The problem page's corrected Statement adds Chvátal's finite ground set to the site's wording, and the theorem is that Statement.
Formalization. Boon Suan Ho's Lean 4 development A formalization of
Chang, Liu, and Liu's proof of Chvátal's conjecture, registered at the
Palomar registry on 17 September 2026 (entry PALOMAR-2026-09-17-000004,
version 1), with the source repository pinned to the registered commit. The
registry entry lists the theorems ChvatalSubmission.chvatal,
Chvatal.sharp_correlation and Chvatal.kleitman_weighted_bound among nine,
toolchain v4.33.1 with a pinned Mathlib revision, the permitted axioms
propext, Quot.sound and Classical.choice, and says the formalization was
prepared by GPT-6; the repository's README says the mathematics is the
preprint's and that the maintainer made no mathematical contribution. The
development declares itself a formalization of this result, so it is a link
here and not a claim of its own. This corpus has not built it or audited its
statement, so no formalized evidence is listed.
Claimant. Fan Chang, Hong Liu and Miao Liu, whose acknowledgments say that ChatGPT was used to test candidate inequalities for special classes of functions and proved the case of Theorem 1.2 for symmetric threshold functions, and that the authors wrote and checked every argument. The claim reached the erdosproblems.com proof-claims forum on 30 September 2026, posted by another forum user, with ChatGPT in the tools field and the formalization linked; the same entry names the two later proofs, the Keevash and Ellis–Filmus–Friedgut pages, both of which credit this preprint with the first proof and build on its ideas.
Acceptance. None recorded: the preprint is not refereed, the forum entry
has no comments, and the site labels the problem OPEN (2026-10-07). That two
later preprints by
other authors state the conjecture as proved by this one is scholarly
acknowledgment, not a review record, and the claim stays claimed until an
independent acceptance or a refereed publication is recorded.