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Term

Arithmetic Number

Numbers whose divisors have an integer average — d(n) divides σ(n) (1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, …).

10.839 numbers tagged.

An arithmetic number is one for which the average of the positive divisors is itself an integer. For 14, the divisors are 1, 2, 7, 14; they sum to 24 and there are 4 of them, so the mean is 6 — an integer. So 14 is arithmetic.

Every odd prime is arithmetic (divisors \(1\) and \(p\) average to \((p+1)/2\)). Erdős, Pomerance, and others showed arithmetic numbers have density 1 — almost all numbers are arithmetic — which makes the exceptions (like 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18) the interesting ones.

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