Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. There is a constant such that for all large : every with , for a fixed small and large, has a subset with reciprocal sum one. This refutes the expectation of Erdős and Graham, printed in their 1980 monograph, that .
Covers. The qualitative bound only: the existence of some , with
no value of and no asymptotic. The value disproved records what the
bound decides: the conjectured estimate of the monograph,
which the 1999 booklet's form of the problem asks about directly and the
site's question leaves to its commentary, is false. The asymptotic
is the full claim
Liu and Sawhney's Theorem 1.3,
which implies this bound.
Acceptance. Croot's paper, On a coloring conjecture about unit
fractions, Annals of Mathematics (2) 157 (2003), no. 2, 545–556, is
refereed, and its publication date, 1 March 2003 in the DOI record of the
March 2003 issue, dates this page; the arXiv posting of 24 November 2003
is the published version uploaded later. The refereed paper does not state
the bound, so the page lists no refereed evidence: its
Main Theorem
is a unit-subsum criterion for a set of smooth integers in a short range
whose reciprocal mass exceeds six. The site's curator, Thomas Bloom,
credits Croot's work with the disproof in the problem's commentary,
independently of the author, and Liu and Sawhney write in their refereed
paper that the bound follows from Croot's work, so the only refereed
statement of the bound is theirs, not Croot's; neither writes the
deduction out, and the corpus has not compiled it. The page records that
attribution as made, not a compiled result.