English

A generalization of the practical numbers

Number Theory 2017-03-24 v2

Abstract

A positive integer nn is practical if every mnm \leq n can be written as a sum of distinct divisors of nn. One can generalize the concept of practical numbers by applying an arithmetic function ff to each of the divisors of nn and asking whether all integers in a given interval can be expressed as sums of f(d)f(d)'s, where the dd's are distinct divisors of nn. We will refer to such nn as `ff-practical.' In this paper, we introduce the ff-practical numbers for the first time. We give criteria for when all ff-practical numbers can be constructed via a simple necessary-and-sufficient condition, demonstrate that it is possible to construct ff-practical sets with any asymptotic density, and prove a series of results related to the distribution of ff-practical numbers for many well-known arithmetic functions ff.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.08504,
  title  = {A generalization of the practical numbers},
  author = {Nicholas Schwab and Lola Thompson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.08504},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:03:42.728Z