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
Retained formal statement
Alexeev and Mixon [arxiv/2510.19804] have disproved this conjecture, proving that cannot be extended to a perfect difference set modulo for any prime .
∀ (A : Set ℕ), A = {1, 2, 4, 8} → Finite ↑A ∧ IsSidon A ∧ ∀ (B : Set ℕ) (p : ℕ), Prime p → A ⊆ B → ¬IsPerfectDifferenceSet B (p ^ 2 + p + 1)SolvedStatement only, no proof