Highly abundant number

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Sums of the divisors, in Cuisenaire rods, of the first six highly abundant numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8)

In number theory, a highly abundant number is a natural number with the property that the sum of its divisors (including itself) is greater than the sum of the divisors of any smaller natural number.

Highly abundant numbers and several similar classes of numbers were first introduced by Pillai (1943), and early work on the subject was done by Alaoglu and Erdős (1944). Alaoglu and Erdős tabulated all highly abundant numbers up to 104, and showed that the number of highly abundant numbers less than any N is at least proportional to log2 N.

Formally, a natural number n is called highly abundant if and only if for all natural numbers m < n,

where σ denotes the sum-of-divisors function. The first few highly abundant numbers are

1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 60, ... (sequence A002093 in the OEIS).

For instance, 5 is not highly abundant because σ(5) = 5+1 = 6 is smaller than σ(4) = 4 + 2 + 1 = 7, while 8 is highly abundant because σ(8) = 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 15 is larger than all previous values of σ.

The only odd highly abundant numbers are 1 and 3.[1]

Relations with other sets of numbers

Notes

References

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