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Level A · Machine-checkable Hard Number theory P-oeis-230718

Smallest n-th power equal to a sum of consecutive immediately preceding positive n-th powers

Is a(n) ≠ 0 for any n > 3?

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.

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Cite 
@misc{cairn-oeis-230718,
  title        = {Smallest n-th power equal to a sum of consecutive immediately preceding positive n-th powers},
  author       = {{Cairn Commons contributors}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://cairn-commons.com/problems/oeis-230718}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Open problem on Cairn Commons, CC BY 4.0. Accessed 2026-11-11}
}

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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.

or , ,

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Current state

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The problem

The question

Is for any ?

Smallest -th power equal to a sum of some consecutive, immediately preceding, positive -th powers, or if none.

Formal statement (Lean 4)

From Formal Conjectures, module FormalConjectures.OEIS.«230718».

theorem conjecture : ∃ n > 3, a n ≠ 0

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. Report it as a literature claim.
  • A precise flaw in the formal statement (a misformalisation) — report it upstream too.

References

Source and licence

Imported from Formal Conjectures (OEIS), commit 2f91d251c07f. Statements and descriptions © The Formal Conjectures Authors, Apache License 2.0; reformatted for this page.