An explicit lower bound for the unit distance problem

Will Sawin

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arXiv · 2605.20579

An explicit lower bound for the unit distance problem

Will Sawin

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Abstract

We show that there are sets of $n$ points in the plane with $n$ arbitrarily large that contain more than $n^{1.014}$ pairs of points separated by a distance exactly $1$. This improves on very recent work of a team at OpenAI, who proved the same result with an inexplicit exponent greater than $1$, drastically improving on the best previous lower bound and disproving a conjecture of Erdős. The method is number-theoretic, relying on constructing algebraic number fields of large degree and small discriminant with many primes of small norm via a Golod-Shafarevich criterion argument.

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Will Sawin. 2026-05-20. An explicit lower bound for the unit distance problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20579

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