Covering System - Some Unsolved Problems

Some Unsolved Problems

The following problem from Paul Erdős is unsolved: Whether for any arbitrarily large N there exists an incongruent covering system the minimum of whose moduli is at least N. It is easy to construct examples where the minimum of the moduli in such a system is 2, or 3 (Erdős gave an example where the moduli are in the set of the divisors of 120; a suitable cover is 0(3), 0(4), 0(5), 1(6), 1(8), 2(10), 11(12), 1(15), 14(20), 5(24), 8(30), 6(40), 58(60), 26(120) ); D. Swift gave an example where the minimum of the moduli is 4 (and the moduli are in the set of the divisors of 2880). S. L. G. Choi proved that it is possible to give an example for N = 20, and Pace P Nielsen demonstrates the existence of an example with N = 40, consisting of more than congruences.

In another problem we want that all of the moduli (of an incongruent covering system) be odd. There is a famous unsolved conjecture from Erdős and Selfridge: an incongruent covering system (with the minimum modulus greater than 1) whose moduli are odd, does not exist. It is known that if such a system exists, the overall modulus must have at least 22 prime factors.

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