OPEN
This is open, and cannot be resolved with a finite computation.
Is every large odd integer $n$ the sum of a squarefree number and a power of 2?
The open status of this problem reflects the current belief of the owner of this website. There may be literature on this problem that I am unaware of, which may partially or completely solve the stated problem. Please do your own literature search before expending significant effort on solving this problem. If you find any relevant literature not mentioned here, please add this in a comment.
Odlyzko has checked this up to $10^7$. Hercher
[He24b] has verified this is true for all odd integers up to $2^{50}\approx 1.12\times 10^{15}$.
Granville and Soundararajan
[GrSo98] have proved that this is very related to the problem of finding
Wieferich primes, which are $p$ for which $2^{p-1}\equiv 1\pmod{p^2}$ - for example, if every odd integer is the sum of a squarefree number and a power of $2$ then a positive proportion of primes are non-Wieferich primes.
Erdős often asked this under the weaker assumption that $n$ is not divisible by $4$. Erdős thought that proving this with two powers of 2 is perhaps easy, and could prove that it is true (with a single power of two) for almost all $n$.
See also
[9],
[10], and
[16].
This is mentioned in problem A19 of Guy's collection
[Gu04].
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This page was last edited 05 April 2026. View history
Additional thanks to: Dogmachine and Milos
When referring to this problem, please use the original sources of Erdős. If you wish to acknowledge this website, the recommended citation format is:
T. F. Bloom, Erdős Problem #11, https://www.erdosproblems.com/11, accessed 2026-05-21