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 for some prime . Alexeev and Mixon establish that 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.
Sources
FormalConjectures/ErdosProblems/
707.lean
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 , but this can be shifted to natural numbers as pointed out in [arxiv/2510.19804].
∀ (A : Set ℕ), A = {1, 3, 9, 10, 13} → Finite ↑A ∧ IsSidon A ∧ ∀ (B : Set ℕ) (n : ℕ), A ⊆ B → ¬IsPerfectDifferenceSet B n