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List of conjectures by Paul Erdős

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The prolific mathematician Paul Erdős and his various collaborators made many famous mathematical conjectures, over a wide field of subjects, and in many cases Erdős offered monetary rewards for solving them.

Contents

Unsolved

  • The Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture on coloring unions of cliques.
  • The Erdős–Gyárfás conjecture on cycles with lengths equal to a power of two in graphs with minimum degree 3.
  • The Erdős–Hajnal conjecture that in a family of graphs defined by an excluded induced subgraph, every graph has either a large clique or a large independent set.
  • The Erdős–Mollin–Walsh conjecture on consecutive triples of powerful numbers.
  • The Erdős–Selfridge conjecture that a covering set contains at least one odd member.
  • The Erdős–Straus conjecture on the Diophantine equation 4/n = 1/x + 1/y + 1/z.
  • The Erdős conjecture on arithmetic progressions in sequences with divergent sums of reciprocals.
  • The Erdős–Szekeres conjecture on the number of points needed to ensure that a point set contains a large convex polygon.
  • The Erdős–Turán conjecture on additive bases of natural numbers.
  • A conjecture on quickly growing integer sequences with rational reciprocal series.
  • A conjecture with Norman Oler on circle packing in an equilateral triangle with a number of circles one less than a triangular number.
  • The minimum overlap problem to estimate the limit of M(n).

    • Solved

  • The Erdős–Burr conjecture on Ramsey numbers of graphs, proved by Choongbum Lee in 2015.
  • A conjecture on equitable colorings proven in 1970 by András Hajnal and Endre Szemerédi and now known as the Hajnal–Szemerédi theorem.
  • A conjecture that would have strengthened the Furstenberg–Sárközy theorem to state that the number of elements in a square-difference-free set of positive integers could only exceed the square root of its largest value by a polylogarithmic factor, disproved by András Sárközy in 1978.
  • The Erdős–Lovász conjecture on weak/strong delta-systems, proved by Michel Deza in 1974.
  • The Erdős–Heilbronn conjecture in combinatorial number theory on the number of sums of two sets of residues modulo a prime, proved by Dias da Silva and Hamidoune in 1994.
  • The Erdős–Graham conjecture in combinatorial number theory on monochromatic Egyptian fraction representations of unity, proved by Ernie Croot in 2000.
  • The Erdős–Stewart conjecture on the Diophantine equation n! + 1 = pka pk+1b, solved by Florian Luca in 2001.
  • The Cameron–Erdős conjecture on sum-free sets of integers, proved by Ben Green and Alexander Sapozhenko in 2003–2004.
  • The Erdős–Menger conjecture on disjoint paths in infinite graphs, proved by Ron Aharoni and Eli Berger in 2009.
  • The Erdős distinct distances problem. The correct exponent was proved in 2010 by Larry Guth and Nets Katz, but the correct power of log n is still open.
  • Erdős discrepancy problem on partial sums of ±1-sequences.

    • References

    List of conjectures by Paul Erdős Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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