Miller et al.'s conjecture on infinite square-free digit walks

For a positive integer NN, define the right-append map by

Td(N)=10N+d,T_d(N)=10N+d,

where d{0,1,,9}d\in\{0,1,\dots,9\}. A positive integer is square-free if it is not divisible by any perfect square greater than 11.

Miller et al.'s conjecture. There exists an infinite sequence of square-free integers

{N0,N1,N2,N3,}\{N_0,N_1,N_2,N_3,\dots\}

and digits dk+1{0,1,,9}d_{k+1}\in\{0,1,\dots,9\} such that

Nk+1=10Nk+dk+1N_{k+1}=10N_k+d_{k+1}

for all k0k\geq 0.

This asks whether one can continue a square-free walk indefinitely by successively appending decimal digits. The question was raised by Miller et al.; despite the result in the paper being previously obtained by Mirsky in 1947, the stated conjecture remains open.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Evan Chen, Chris Cummins, Ben Eltschig, Dejan Grubisic, Leopold Haller, Letong Hong, Andranik Kurghinyan, Kenny Lau, Hugh Leather, Seewoo Lee, Aram Markosyan, Ken Ono, Manooshree Patel, Gaurang Pendharkar, Vedant Rathi, Alex Schneidman, Volker Seeker, Shubho Sengupta, Ishan Sinha, Jimmy Xin and Jujian Zhang, “Dead ends in square-free digit walks”, arXiv:2602.05095 (2026).

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