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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 statement3 of 11

Alexeev and Mixon [arxiv/2510.19804] have disproved this conjecture, showing that {1,2,4,8,13}\{1, 2, 4, 8, 13\} cannot be extended to any perfect difference set.

FormalConjectures/ErdosProblems/707.leanErdos707.erdos_707.variants.counterexample_mian_chowla1 lineExact file
∀ (A : Set ℕ), A = {1, 2, 4, 8, 13} → FiniteAIsSidon A ∧ ∀ (B : Set ℕ) (n : ℕ), AB → ¬IsPerfectDifferenceSet B n
SolvedStatement only, no proof

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