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Erdős problem 707

Erdős conjectured, in over a dozen papers spanning 1976 to 1997 and with a 1000 dollars prize attached, that every finite Sidon set extends to a perfect difference set modulo p2+p+1p^2+p+1 for some prime pp. Alexeev and Mixon establish that {1,2,4,8}\{1,2,4,8\} is a counterexample - and discovered along the way that Marshall Hall, Jr. had published a different counterexample three decades before Erdős first posed the problem, unnoticed by the community for half a century.

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12 retained statements2415f78e850a

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FormalConjectures/ErdosProblems/

707.lean

Retained formal statement2 of 11

This conjecture was actually first disproved by Hall in 1947 [Ha47], long before Erdős asked this question. A counterexample for any modulus from from [Ha47] in the paragraph following Theorem 4.3, where it was given as {8,6,0,1,4}\{-8, -6, 0, 1, 4\}, but this can be shifted to natural numbers as pointed out in [arxiv/2510.19804].

FormalConjectures/ErdosProblems/707.leanErdos707.erdos_707.variants.counterexample_hall2 linesExact file
∀ (A : Set ℕ),  A = {1, 3, 9, 10, 13} → FiniteAIsSidon A ∧ ∀ (B : Set ℕ) (n : ℕ), AB → ¬IsPerfectDifferenceSet B n
SolvedStatement only, no proof

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