English

On Characterizing Potential Friends of 20

General Mathematics 2025-09-16 v4

Abstract

Does 2020 have a friend? Or is it a solitary number? A folklore conjecture asserts that 2020 has no friends i.e. it is a solitary number. In this article, we prove that, a friend NN of 2020 is of the form N=252am2N=2\cdot5^{2a}\cdot m^2, with (3,m)=(7,m)=1(3,m)=(7,m)=1 and it has at least six distinct prime divisors. Furthermore, we show that Ω(N)2ω(N)+6a5\Omega(N)\geq 2\omega(N)+6a-5 and if Ω(m)K\Omega(m)\leq K then N<106(2K2a+31)2N< 10\cdot 6^{(2^{K-2a+3}-1)^2}, where Ω(n)\Omega(n) and ω(n)\omega(n) denote the total number of prime divisors and the number of distinct prime divisors of the integer nn respectively. In addition, we deduce that, not all exponents of odd prime divisors of friend NN of 2020 are congruent to 1-1 modulo ff, where ff is the order of 55 in (Z/pZ)×(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z})^\times such that 3f3\mid f and pp is a prime congruent to 11 modulo 66. Also, we prove necessary upper bounds for all prime divisors of friends of 20 in terms of the number of divisors of the friend. In addition, we prove that, if PP is the largest prime divisor of NN then P<N14P<N^{\frac{1}{4}}.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.04451,
  title  = {On Characterizing Potential Friends of 20},
  author = {Tapas Chatterjee and Sagar Mandal and Sourav Mandal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04451},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

25 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:36:46.096Z