Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. In the notation of Problem 291, if the leading digit of in base is , that is for some , then . The reason is short: is the exact power of dividing , so in every term with is a multiple of , and the only divisible by are and , whose two terms sum to with ; hence , and since . These form a set of positive lower density, so for infinitely many : the second question of the problem is answered in the affirmative.
Covers. The second question, that occurs for infinitely many . Not covered: the first question, whether occurs for infinitely many , and the exact criterion saying which primes divide , which the site's commentary states in general and which is Shiu's Theorem 2 on Shiu's claim page.
Standing. Claimed. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom, records in the
problem's commentary that the second question has an easy affirmative
answer and credits the observation to Stefan Steinerberger; but the site
labels the whole problem OPEN and declares no parts, so
that credit is context for this claim and not acceptance evidence, and
reviewed is not listed. The observation has no written source of its own,
so refereed is not listed. The site's page
shows a last edit of 12 January 2026; the observation is absent from the
archived copy of the page of 19 June 2024, which carries the statement and
no commentary, and present in the archived copy of 7 November 2024, the
date this page carries. An earlier written proof of the same answer is
Shiu's preprint of 2016, whose Theorem 2 gives the general criterion and
whose Theorem 1(iii) gives the infinitude by another route; the commentary
cites that preprint only for a heuristic count, so it has its own pending
page, linked above. A Lean 4 package submitted on 16 September 2026 as a
pull request to a prize program's repository (TheJustinSunPrize/awards,
PR 216, closed without merge on 24 September 2026; linked above at its
head commit) proves erdos_291_part_ii, the statement of the
formal-conjectures rendering erdos_291.parts.ii, from this observation
(its lemma three_dvd_a), names the observation as recorded on the site
and claims no novelty; its README says the proof was prepared with Claude
Code, with Claude Fable 5.1 for orchestration and Claude Opus 5 for
implementation. It is third-party Lean that this corpus has not
built or audited, so formalized is not listed, and the formal-conjectures
statement file itself marks part (ii) solved with a sorry body, which is
not a formalization. The observation is the case , of the
criterion checked by exact arithmetic on the problem page for all odd
primes below and all .