Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. In every finite coloring of the positive integers there are pairwise distinct positive integers of one color with
Positive integers are integers, so this answers the question of Problem 303 over the integers, and in a stronger form. It is the case , of Brown and Rödl's Corollary 2.3, which gives, for every finite coloring of the positive integers, every and every , pairwise distinct monochromatic with ; here .
Route. The distinct-variable form of Rado's theorem gives a monochromatic solution of in distinct variables (Corollary 2.2). The reciprocal transfer theorem (Theorem 2.1) carries distinct-variable partition regularity of a homogeneous system to the system with every variable replaced by its reciprocal: compactness gives a finite witness interval, and with the least common multiple of that interval turns an additive solution into a reciprocal one. The paper notes that Hanno Lefmann independently obtained the transfer theorem without the distinctness requirement (Theorem 2.1a); that version does not by itself give the pairwise-distinct conclusion the problem asks for.
Acceptance. Refereed: Brown, Tom C. and Rödl, Vojtěch, Monochromatic solutions to equations with unit fractions, Bull. Austral. Math. Soc. 43 (1991), no. 3, 387--392. The publisher's record dates the issue June 1991 and gives no day; the day in this page's name is the first of that month. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas Bloom, marks Problem 303 proved and credits the coloring statement to Brown and Rödl in the problem's commentary. The library holds the journal PDF and the author's copy on the source card, whose result pages record the statements, a rewritten proof of the corollary and the structure of the transfer argument; no independent review of the proof is recorded in this corpus. A second, independent proof is Yuan's Seed-Prover Lean proof.
Formalization. The file src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos303.lean in
Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs collection at the pinned commit (the third
link) declares itself a Lean formalization of a solution to Problem 303 and
names Brown and Rödl as its informal authors, the Formal Conjectures authors
for the statement, and Seed-Prover, Aristotle, Zheng Yuan and Boris Alexeev
as its formal authors. Its theorem erdos_303 proves the site's integer
formulation, distinct nonzero same-colored with for
every finite coloring of the integers, by a re-proof with Aristotle of the
lemmas of Yuan's Seed-Prover proof, an independently produced proof that
specializes this paper's reciprocal transfer to the single equation, with
the finite Ramsey theorem (Schur's theorem) in place of Rado's theorem and
compactness. This corpus built that file and checked erdos_303 against
the repository's comparator challenge; the acceptance is recorded on
Yuan's claim page,
whose route the file follows, and this page lists no formalized evidence,
since the file does not formalize the paper's argument.