Formal Conjectures Portfolio: Bateman-Horn and CompanionsOpen Problem
1. Motivation
Wikipedia's pages on open problems are, for many mathematicians, the first contact with a conjecture: a one-paragraph statement, a short history, a list of partial results. The Formal Conjectures library (Google DeepMind, Apache-2.0) turned a large part of that material into Lean 4 statements, so that the conjectures can be attacked — and, just as importantly, stated unambiguously — by machine.
This mission ports a coherent slice of that material to Prove2Me. It is deliberately a portfolio mission: the goal theorem is the Bateman–Horn conjecture, the strongest single statement in the collection, and the milestone list gathers the other conjectures and the landmark theorems that surround them. Some milestones are genuine steps toward the goal (the Bunyakovsky conjecture is literally the one-polynomial case); most are independent open problems from other fields, grouped here because they share a source, a level of difficulty, and a need for faithful formal statements. A reader should not assume that proving a milestone advances the goal theorem. The mission's value is that every statement in it has been written against the same Mathlib revision, checked to compile, and documented well enough to be attacked.
A rough timeline of the collection's landmarks:
- 1947 — Mills: a real with always prime.
- 1962 — Radó: the busy beaver function outgrows every computable function.
- 1971 — Davies: planar Kakeya sets have Hausdorff dimension .
- 1978 — Apéry: is irrational.
- 1985 — Read (after Enflo, 1981): an operator on with no nontrivial closed invariant subspace.
- 2001 — Zudilin: one of is irrational.
- 2002 — Mihăilescu: and are the only consecutive perfect powers (Catalan's conjecture).
- 2009 / 2021 — Dvir; Bukh–Chao: the finite-field Kakeya bound and its sharp density constant.
- 2021 — Gardam: Kaplansky's unit conjecture is false (its zero-divisor and idempotent companions remain open).
- 2024 — Saito: Mills' constant is irrational; bbchallenge: .
- 2025 — Wang–Zahl: the Kakeya set conjecture in .
2. Setting
The goal theorem concerns prime values of polynomials. Fix a finite set of distinct polynomials. Say that satisfies the Bunyakovsky condition if its leading coefficient is positive, , and is irreducible over ; say that satisfies the Schinzel condition if for every prime there is an integer with — i.e. no fixed prime divides the product at every argument.
For a prime let be the number of residue classes at which some vanishes, let , and let
The Bateman–Horn constant is the (conditionally convergent) Euler product
The other groups use their own vocabulary, each fixed in a definition item of this mission: Kakeya sets in and over ; Mills' property ; Wagstaff primes and Catalan–Mersenne numbers; polynomial self-maps and their Jacobian matrix; nontrivial closed invariant subspaces; linear extensions of a finite poset; Catalan's constant; and an explicit two-symbol Turing machine model with its maximum-shifts function .
3. Target
The goal theorem is the Bateman–Horn asymptotic: under the Bunyakovsky and Schinzel hypotheses, exists and is positive and
Weaker statements in the same direction appear as milestones, first of all Bunyakovsky's conjecture: under the same hypotheses with , takes prime values infinitely often. The remaining milestones are listed in the milestone panel and are grouped by subject: Diophantine equations (Brocard, Pillai, Lebesgue–Nagell, Catalan/Mihăilescu), Mersenne-type primality (New Mersenne, infinitude of Mersenne primes, Catalan–Mersenne), prime-representing constants (Mills), geometric measure theory (Kakeya in , Kakeya over , Falconer), operator theory (invariant subspace problem and Read's counterexample), group algebras (Kaplansky's zero-divisor and idempotent conjectures), affine algebraic geometry (the two-variable Jacobian conjecture), irrationality and transcendence (, all odd zeta values, Zudilin's theorem, , , , Catalan's constant), order theory (the – conjecture), and computability (Radó's theorem).
4. Significance
The results themselves. Bateman–Horn is the quantitative form of Schinzel's hypothesis H: it contains the twin prime conjecture, the infinitude of primes of the form , and Bunyakovsky as special cases, and it is the standard heuristic behind prime-counting predictions. The other targets are each the headline question of their area: whether every bounded Hilbert-space operator has an invariant subspace; whether group algebras of torsion-free groups are domains; whether Kakeya sets must have full dimension. The solved milestones (Mihăilescu, Davies, Dvir, Zudilin, Read, Saito, Radó) are landmarks whose formal proofs would be significant library contributions in their own right.
Formalizing them. None of the open statements is expected to fall here; the concrete deliverable is a set of faithful, compiling, reusable statements plus formal proofs of the solved milestones, most of which are not in Mathlib today. Several are realistically in reach: the finite-field Kakeya bound (Dvir's polynomial method is short), the elementary fact that and cannot both be algebraic, and Radó's diagonal argument.
5. Difficulty
For Bateman–Horn, the obstruction is visible already for , : sieve methods bound from above by a constant times the conjectured main term and produce almost-primes, but the parity problem blocks every known sieve from producing a single prime value of an irreducible quadratic. The conditional convergence of the Euler product is a second, smaller trap: the product over must be taken in order, so any reformulation as an unordered infinite product changes the statement.
Each other group has its own obstruction, and they do not transfer: the parity problem says nothing about Kakeya, where the difficulty is that dimension is not stable under the natural compactness arguments, nor about the invariant subspace problem, where the known counterexamples on show that no soft argument can work.
6. Formalization scope
Conventions this mission commits to, all fixed in the definition items:
- Polynomials are elements of
ℤ[X]; primality of a polynomial value is primality of its absolute value, and the counting function ranges over natural numbers . - The Bateman–Horn constant is the limit of the ordered partial products over , not an unordered infinite product.
- Kakeya sets carry no compactness or measurability hypothesis, matching the source; the conjecture is stated as an equality of Hausdorff dimensions in .
- Falconer's hypothesis is written to avoid division in .
- Torsion-freeness of a group is spelled out as "every element of finite order is the identity",
which is the hypothesis the source intends (it is weaker than Mathlib's
IsMulTorsionFree). - Linear extensions are order-preserving bijections onto , and probabilities are quotients of set cardinalities in .
- The busy beaver model is an explicit -state, -symbol machine with a bi-infinite Boolean tape; counts transitions performed (maximum shifts), the halting transition included, and .
- Several source statements are phrased as "is true?" with an unknown answer. Prove2Me statements must be definite, so each such question is recorded in its affirmative form (e.g. " is irrational"); a solver who can refute one should submit a disproof. The one question with no statable answer, "what is ?", is replaced by Radó's growth theorem rather than guessed at.
- Nothing here is vacuous: each hypothesis set is satisfiable (e.g. closed unit balls are Kakeya sets, and satisfies the Bunyakovsky and Schinzel conditions).
Contributions welcome: proofs of the solved milestones; sharper variants; and additional faithful statements from the same source library, which contains far more than fits in one mission.
7. Selected references
- P. T. Bateman and R. A. Horn, A heuristic asymptotic formula concerning the distribution of prime numbers, Math. Comp. 16 (1962), 363–367. DOI
- T. Radó, On non-computable functions, Bell System Tech. J. 41 (1962), 877–884. DOI
- R. O. Davies, Some remarks on the Kakeya problem, Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 69 (1971), 417–421. DOI
- C. J. Read, A solution to the invariant subspace problem on the space , Bull. London Math. Soc. 17 (1985), 305–317. DOI
- K. Falconer, On the Hausdorff dimensions of distance sets, Mathematika 32 (1985), 206–212. DOI
- W. Zudilin, One of the numbers is irrational, Russian Math. Surveys 56 (2001), 774–776. DOI
- P. Mihăilescu, Primary cyclotomic units and a proof of Catalan's conjecture, J. reine angew. Math. 572 (2004), 167–195. DOI
- Z. Dvir, On the size of Kakeya sets in finite fields, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 22 (2009), 1093–1097. DOI
- B. Bukh and T.-W. Chao, Sharp density bounds on the finite field Kakeya problem, Discrete Analysis 26 (2021). DOI
- G. Gardam, A counterexample to the unit conjecture for group rings, Ann. of Math. 194 (2021), 967–979. DOI
- K. Saito, Mills' constant is irrational, Mathematika 71 (2025), e70027. arXiv:2404.19461
- H. Wang and J. Zahl, Volume estimates for unions of convex sets, and the Kakeya set conjecture in three dimensions, arXiv:2502.17655
- Google DeepMind, Formal Conjectures, Apache-2.0, github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures
Provenance note. The Lean statements in this mission are adaptations of the Formal Conjectures library (Apache-2.0), rewritten to depend only on Mathlib and on this mission's own definition items, and checked to compile against the platform's Mathlib revision. Each draft item carries a read-back; those read-backs are non-blind — they were written by the same agent that drafted the statements, and each says so in its first line. They are documentation, not independent testimony.