Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Let be a periodic sequence of non-zero integers, let
and define by
. The note's Corollary states that
, so in particular
for infinitely many . It rests on the note's Theorem:
for any bounded sequence of non-zero integers and any integer
larger than every , some has divisible by a prime
larger than ; for periodic with period , a prime
dividing also divides for
, which gives the Corollary. The constant sequence
gives in the notation of
Problem 291, so the Corollary
contains the second question of the problem, that for
infinitely many , and strengthens it to unbounded common factors. The
Lean 4 file linked above, ErdosProblem291.lean, proves the Theorem as
ohyeah1 and the Corollary as generalErdos291 over Mathlib without
sorry, taking as hypotheses two known results that it does not prove:
for all , with the number of primes
below , which is the Rosser--Schoenfeld bound in
another form, and for all , which follows from Nair's
lower bound for ; the file's header says these
are expected to follow from a separate prime-number-theorem formalization
project. The comment adds that without periodicity the Corollary fails:
signs can be chosen so that for all .
Covers. The second question, that occurs for infinitely many , as the case of a statement about every periodic sequence of non-zero numerators, together with the unboundedness of the common factor. Not covered: the first question, whether occurs for infinitely many , on which the note and the file say nothing.
Depends on. Van Doorn's 2024 paper is the source the note builds on, by its own account; the two hypotheses of the Lean proof are classical theorems outside the file.
Standing. Claimed. The note, "Generalized harmonic sums have arbitrarily
large prime factors", is a PDF in the author's GitHub repository
Woett/Miscellaneous, uploaded 5 February 2026 and linked above at its
last change; it has no arXiv or journal record. The author announced it and
the Lean file in the problem's discussion thread on 6 February 2026,
crediting the formalization to Aristotle, Harmonic's automated proving
system; the comment is not on the site's proof-claim tab, which is empty,
and the site's label is OPEN (as of 2026-10-07; page last edited 12
January 2026), so no curator, referee or named mathematician has accepted the
result. The Lean file is third-party Lean that this corpus has not built or
audited, and its proof is conditional on the two hypotheses above, so
formalized is not listed; the mathematical claim itself is unconditional,
since both hypotheses are proved theorems, and the claim is recorded as
partial rather than conditional for that reason. The same answer to the
second question has two earlier pages,
Shiu's criterion and infinitude theorem
and
Steinerberger's base-3 observation,
by different routes.