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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 statement8 of 11

It is false that any finite Sidon set can be embedded in a perfect difference set modulo p^2 + p + 1 for some prime p.

As described in [arxiv/2510.19804], a counterexample is provided in [Ha47], see below. The proof of this has been formalized.

FormalConjectures/ErdosProblems/707.leanErdos707.erdos_707.variants.prime1 lineExact file
(∀ (A : Set ℕ), A.FiniteIsSidon A → ∃ B p, Nat.Prime pABIsPerfectDifferenceSet B (p ^ 2 + p + 1)) ↔ False
SolvedStatement only, no proof

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