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
The Singer construction gives perfect difference sets for n = p^2 + p + 1 where p is a prime power.
∀ (p : ℕ), IsPrimePow p → ∃ B, IsPerfectDifferenceSet B (p ^ 2 + p + 1) ∧ B.ncard = p + 1TextbookStatement only, no proof