Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For let be the set of integers that occur as a denominator in some representation with , and let , as in the problem page's corrected Statement. The manuscript Short Egyptian fractions of the OpenAI mathematics release (OpenAI, 25 September 2026; the release's README says that its manuscripts were produced by an internal OpenAI model and that the collection includes results at different stages of verification, and it names no individual author) states as its Corollary 1.3 that for every sufficiently large
and that for each fixed , for all large . So . The lower bound is the new content: it proves the doubly exponential growth that van Doorn and Tang's Section 3 anticipated from the conjecture of Problem 304, and it rules out the monograph's alternative guess . The upper bound is weaker than the recorded , as the manuscript says. The route: a greedy prefix that reserves the denominator reduces to a remainder to which the manuscript's Theorem 1.1 (the accepted claim of Problem 304) applies, giving a distinct expansion of containing of length ; a separate construction with an explicit coefficient gives length at most for large ; a padding that preserves one denominator (van Doorn and Tang's Lemma 2.1, reproved) carries each marker to every larger length. The statement, its locators and a structural reading of the proof are on the result page of the source card, whose card records the release's provenance and attestations; the prose proof was read there for structure only and no step was checked.
Depends on.
The release's Theorem 1.1,
in the manuscript's proof of the corollary, supplies a marked expansion of
through only for the finitely many small below the threshold of the
explicit construction; the slope comes from that construction
(the manuscript's Proposition 8.1), not from Theorem 1.1. The Lean proof does
not use that theorem at all: at the pinned revision
prescribed_denominator_corollary is assembled in Main.lean from
exact_marker_padding, every_exact_marker_occurs,
quantitative_marked_length and missing_denominator_semantics, and
every_exact_marker_occurs is an elementary telescoping construction in
MarkerOccurrence.lean (the reciprocal of plus reciprocals of pronic
numbers), while main_double_log_order, the declaration that page records,
enters only the separate counting theorem counting_double_log_order. The
formalized evidence therefore stands on its own; the link records the prose
proof's use of the accepted theorem.
Covers. The double-exponential order of (the problem page's corrected Statement: least in no -term representation of ). For all large , , and ; for each , eventually. So . This proves the lower bound van Doorn–Tang anticipated and rules out the monograph's alternative. Not settled: the exact slope (whether , the monograph's guess) or any asymptotic for .
Acceptance. The evidence is formalized. The release's Lean development at
the pinned revision declares, in
lean/OAI/NumberTheory/EgyptianFractions/Main.lean, the theorem
OAI.Problem337.prescribed_denominator_corollary, whose three conjuncts are
the displayed bounds for all , the liminf and limsup inequalities for
prescribedSlope k, which is , and the bound $e^{e^{ck}}\le
v(k)$ eventually for every , and the theorem
OAI.Problem337.missing_denominator_semantics, which proves for every
that D k is finite, that the missing set is nonempty, that v k is at least
, lies outside D k and is the least such integer, and that
for ; so v k is the attained minimum of the
Formulation's set and not the junk value of an empty infimum, and the real
liminf and limsup are not their default because bounds them
below. The definitions (IsOneExpansion: denominators at least , strictly
increasing on Fin k, exact sum ; D, which collects denominators at least
; missingDenominators; v) are the Formulation's and , the
omission of from D being harmless since looks only at . The
corpus's verification built both declarations and checked their axioms, which
are propext, Classical.choice and Quot.sound only, and the comparator
challenge lean/ComparatorChallenges/EgyptianFractions.lean of the release
pins these statements and definitions, with which the solution module's
fingerprints were identical. The namespace Problem337 is the release's own
label and does not refer to catalog Problem 337. The same comparator holds
OAI.Problem337.exact_marker_padding, the nesting for
.
The claim is partial because the problem asks to estimate the growth and the declaration fixes only the double-logarithmic order, with the slope pinned to : whether (the monograph's guess) and any asymptotic for are open. The threshold is existential, so the bound is ineffective and does not replace van Doorn and Tang's for every (their claim page) on the small range. No other acceptance evidence exists: the manuscript is not refereed and has no arXiv version, no outside reviewer has examined it, and the site's page shows the label OPEN (last edited 29 December 2025) with no proof claim on its tab as read on 2026-10-07.