Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. For every coloring of the integers with finitely many colors
there are pairwise distinct nonzero integers of one color with
; the construction gives positive . This is the
question of Problem 303, proved in
Lean 4 as the theorem erdos_303 of the code that Zheng Yuan linked from
the site's forum on 21 December 2025. Yuan posted the code in the Problem
330 discussion, writing on behalf of the Seed-Prover team and identifying
Problem 303 as the problem the system had proved; the proof was produced by
Seed-Prover, an automated theorem-proving system, and the claimant is the
submitter, Yuan. A re-proof of the code is the file Erdos303.lean in
Boris Alexeev's lean-proofs collection (the third link), which names
Seed-Prover, Aristotle, Yuan and Alexeev as its formal authors: the
repository's note on the file says that the theorems of Yuan's proof were
given to Aristotle, Harmonic's system, to reprove, and that the results were
reorganized to shorten the proof.
Submission note. Posted to the site's forum by Zheng Yuan on 21 December 2025:
Hello, I am Zheng Yuan from Seed-Prover. I double check our paper and our proved Erdos problems. This is a typo in our paper since we proved Erdos-303, which is easy. We check the version we searched for 330 is the old version, and we do not prove it. We will update our paper soon. By the way, we don't state we prove any new conjectures (That is our next target.). (Check Erdos-303 here (Note from the moderator: this URL is extremely long, please find a shorter one to replace it with.)
Posted to the site's forum by Boris Alexeev on 21 December 2025:
Over on the forum for [330], Zheng Yuan from Seed-Prover posted this link for Lean code that solves this problem formally. The final statement is from the Formal Conjectures project.
(The site has been updated to address this comment.)
Route. The mathematical rewriting of the code: the finite Ramsey theorem applied to an edge coloring of a complete graph by the colors of the differences gives a monochromatic four-clique whose three consecutive gaps supply positive integers with , and of one color under an auxiliary coloring; a factorial divisible by all of them transfers the triple to the denominators , , , which satisfy , and a parametrization lemma, , verifies the pairwise distinctness. The proof was produced independently of Brown and Rödl's paper, and it specializes their reciprocal transfer, with a common multiple, to the single equation, with the finite Ramsey theorem (Schur's theorem) in place of Rado's theorem and compactness; their argument is on their claim page.
Acceptance. Formalized. This corpus's verification built the file
src/latest/ErdosProblems/Erdos303.lean of Alexeev's collection at the
pinned commit 8822f7dd of 2026-09-15 (Lean v4.33.0, Mathlib v4.33.0,
from the lean-toolchain of src/latest) and checked the axioms of
Erdos303.erdos_303, which are exactly propext, Classical.choice and
Quot.sound. The repository's comparator challenge
ComparatorChallenges/ErdosProblems/Erdos303.lean pins that declaration,
and its fingerprint was found identical to the challenge's. The statement
was audited clause by clause against the problem's Statement and is exact:
for every coloring with finite range
there are integers such that the list has no repeated
entry (so are pairwise distinct and nonzero), holds in
the reals with the integers cast, and have one color. That is the
Formal Conjectures statement with its answer(True) wrapper removed, and it
also gives the positive-integer version: color each nonzero integer by
its sign together with the color of , and negate a negative triple. The
build certifies that file, Alexeev's re-proof of the Seed-Prover lemmas with
Aristotle, at the pinned commit; the note on the re-proof is kept in the
repository's src/v4.24.0 copy of the file at that commit. Yuan's posted
payload was not built: its final theorem is also named erdos_303, and its
text contains no sorry, admit or axiom, but no kernel check of it is
recorded; its provenance and payload identity are on the
source card
and its
source record.
The Formal Conjectures statement file for the problem carries an
external-proof annotation pointing to the Problem 303 thread while its own
theorem body remains by sorry, so it is not a formalization of this claim.
Not reviewed: on that thread Alexeev wrote on 21 December 2025 that the
linked code formally solves the problem, and the site's curator, Thomas
Bloom, relabeled the problem PROVED (LEAN) and marked the comment as
addressed, but the site's commentary credits the proof to Brown and Rödl and
the Lean to the Formal Conjectures project without naming Yuan or
Seed-Prover, so the relabel is not the curator's acceptance of this claim.
Not refereed: there is no journal write-up. Brown and Rödl had already
proved the result in 1991, and
their accepted claim
stands beside this one.