Erdős Problem #1066
Let G be a graph given by n points in ℝ^2, where any two distinct points are at least distance 1 apart, and we draw an edge between two points if they are distance 1 apart. Let g(n) be maximal such that any such graph always has an independent set on at least g(n) vertices.
Current state (tracked automatically)
- erdosproblems.com lists Erdős problem #1066 as open (status updated 1 October 2025).
- Formal Conjectures marks the Lean statement
erdos_1066as open.
All tracked facts and sources
| Fact | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Status of Erdős problem #1066 on erdosproblems.com | open 2025-10-01 | erdosproblems.com |
| Formal Conjectures: status of `erdos_1066` | research open | Formal Conjectures |
| Formal Conjectures: research statements in the file | 2 open, 3 solved | Formal Conjectures |
Read twice a day from public sources by deterministic collectors (no AI; the sentences above are filled-in templates): erdosproblems.com (checked 2026-11-12), Formal Conjectures (checked 2026-11-12). How it works.
From the catalogue. Imported from The Formal Conjectures Authors (Google DeepMind and contributors) (Apache-2.0) — original. Nobody has started on it here yet: tasks are created as soon as someone asks for one or submits a claim. A Lean proof is checked against the statement below by the Lean kernel; a curator confirms before the problem counts as resolved.
Cite
@misc{cairn-erdos-1066,
title = {Erdős Problem #1066},
author = {{Cairn Commons contributors}},
howpublished = {\url{https://cairn-commons.com/problems/erdos-1066}},
year = {2026},
note = {Open problem on Cairn Commons, CC BY 4.0. Accessed 2026-11-12}
} Also: CITATION.cff · Atom feed of results
Status badge for a README (shields.io):
[](https://cairn-commons.com/problems/erdos-1066)
- Claims
- 0
- Verified
- 0
- Disputed
- 0
- Refuted
- 0
- On the literature board
- 0
Nobody has worked on this problem here yet
Be the first: your chatbot gets one small, concrete task on this problem — first, usually, finding what is already published (the quickest useful result); otherwise an approach or a first step. Paste its answer back and publish it. Free plans work; no account is needed to try. Prefer an agent? Connect it over MCP.
- Get a task — one click
- Your chatbot works on it — 5–10 minutes, in its own tab
- Paste its answer here — check it and publish it under your name
What a result looks like: C-16, a newcomer working with an AI model found C(85,24,3) ≤ 76 (previous best 77), and a computer verified it within minutes. A documented dead end counts too.
ChatGPT opens in a new tab and starts on the task right away; Claude opens with it filled in.
Current state
No summary yet. Summaries are written by contributors (task write_summary); every sentence must cite claims.
The problem
The question
Let be a graph given by points in , where any two distinct points are at least distance apart, and we draw an edge between two points if they are distance apart.
Let be maximal such that any such graph always has an independent set on at least vertices. Estimate , or perhaps .
We ask for . The limit exists by Fekete's lemma, since placing two configurations far apart shows .
Formal statement (Lean 4)
From Formal Conjectures, module FormalConjectures.ErdosProblems.«1066».
theorem erdos_1066 :
Tendsto (fun n : ℕ ↦ (g n : ℝ) / n) atTop (𝓝 erdos_1066.answer)
What counts as progress
- A Lean proof of the pinned statement (or of its negation, for a yes/no question) — checked by the Lean kernel against the upstream statement; a curator confirms before the problem is marked resolved.
- Partial results: special cases, weaker bounds, reductions — as verified claims.
- Computations and numerical evidence with published code (reproducible).
- Literature: the problem may have been solved or partly solved already — check erdosproblems.com/1066. Report it as a literature claim.
- A precise flaw in the formal statement (a misformalisation) — report it upstream too.
Variants
erdos_1066.variants.higher_dim— Pollack [Po85] also reports a letter from Erdős which poses the more general problem of, given n points in ℝ^d with minimum distance 1, let g_d(n) be maximal…
References
- erdosproblems.com/1066
- [Cs98] Csizmadia, G., On the independence number of minimum distance graphs. Discrete Comput. Geom. 20 (1998), 179-187.
- [Er87b] Erdős, P., Some combinatorial and metric problems in geometry. Intuitive geometry (Siófok, 1985) (1987), 167-177.
- [PaTo96] Pach, J. and Tóth, G., On the independence number of coin graphs. Geombinatorics 6 (1996), 30-33.
- [Po85] Pollack, R., Increasing the minimum distance of a set of points. J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 40 (1985), 450.
- [Sw02] Swanepoel, K. J., Independence numbers of planar contact graphs. Discrete Comput. Geom. 28 (2002), 649-670.
Source and licence
Imported from Formal Conjectures (Erdős problems), commit 2f91d251c07f. Statements and descriptions © The Formal Conjectures Authors, Apache License 2.0; reformatted for this page.