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Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.

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Claim. The answer to Problem 316 is no. Sándor's paper On a problem of Erdős (J. Number Theory 63 (1997), no. 2, 203--210) exhibits, as the site reports it, the set D={2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15,20,24,30,40,60}D=\{2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15,20,24,30,40,60\} of divisors of 120120 other than 11 and 120120: its reciprocal sum is 239/120<2239/120<2, and no partition D=D1⊔D2D=D_1\sqcup D_2 has both ∑n∈D11/n<1\sum_{n\in D_1}1/n<1 and ∑n∈D21/n<1\sum_{n\in D_2}1/n<1. The site also reports his general theorem that for every n≥2n\ge2 some finite set A⊆N∖{1}A\subseteq\mathbb N\setminus\{1\} has reciprocal sum below nn and cannot be split into nn parts all of reciprocal sum below 11. The paper is not held by the library, so both statements are recorded second-hand from the site; the counterexample itself is a finite check, and the problem page records the corpus's exhaustive recomputation of it with exact rational arithmetic (all 2142^{14} subsets of DD), which confirms it. The strict inequalities are essential: DD does split into two parts with sums at most 11, since {2,3,6}\{2,3,6\} has reciprocal sum exactly 11.

Acceptance. Refereed: the paper appeared in the Journal of Number Theory, volume 63, issue 2, pages 203--210, in April 1997 (DOI 10.1006/jnth.1997.2113; the Crossref record gives the month without a day, and this page's date takes the first of that month). Reviewed: the site's curator, T. F. Bloom, marks the problem disproved and credits Sándor's counterexample; Bloom is not an author of the paper. The corpus has not read the paper; the acceptance rests on the refereed publication, the curator's credit, and the recomputed finite check.

Other counterexamples. The site's commentary also records the eleven-element set {2,3,4,5,6,7,10,11,13,14,15}\{2,3,4,5,6,7,10,11,13,14,15\}, found by Tom Stobart, with reciprocal sum 120047/60060<2120047/60060<2 and no admissible split, and calls it minimal; the problem page records the corpus's recomputation of it and a ten-element set with the same property. Stobart's set appears only in the commentary, not in a dated posting, so it has no claim page of its own.

Formalization. The formal-conjectures file ErdosProblems/316.lean at the pinned commit (17 September 2026) states the question and proves the negative answer in the file by a decide +kernel step over Stobart's eleven-element set. Its docstring attributes the disproof to Sándor's paper and the formalization to Mehta, so it is linked above as a formalization of this result, with the witness changed from Sándor's set to Stobart's. Sándor's general nn-part theorem is left as a sorry there. The corpus has not built or audited it, so no formalized evidence is listed.