Superior highly composite number


In mathematics, a superior highly composite number is a natural number which has more divisors than any other number scaled relative to some positive power of the number itself. It is a stronger restriction than that of a highly composite number, which is defined as having more divisors than any smaller positive integer.
The first 10 superior highly composite numbers and their factorization are listed.
File:Highly_composite_numbers.svg|thumb|250px|Plot of the number of divisors of integers from 1 to 1000. Highly composite numbers are labelled in bold and superior highly composite numbers are starred. In , hover over a bar to see its statistics.
For a superior highly composite number n there exists a positive real number ε such that for all natural numbers k smaller than n we have
and for all natural numbers k larger than n we have
where d, the divisor function, denotes the number of divisors of n. The term was coined by Ramanujan.
The first 15 superior highly composite numbers, 2, 6, 12, 60, 120, 360, 2520, 5040, 55440, 720720, 1441440, 4324320, 21621600, 367567200, 6983776800 are also the first 15 colossally abundant numbers, which meet a similar condition based on the sum-of-divisors function rather than the number of divisors.

Properties

All superior highly composite numbers are highly composite.
An effective construction of the set of all superior highly composite numbers is given by the following monotonic mapping from the positive real numbers. Let
for any prime number p and positive real x. Then
Note that the product need not be computed indefinitely, because if then, so the product to calculate can be terminated once.
Also note that in the definition of, is analogous to in the implicit definition of a superior highly composite number.
Moreover, for each superior highly composite number exists a half-open interval such that .
This representation implies that there exist an infinite sequence of such that for the n-th superior highly composite number holds
The first are 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 7,.... In other words, the quotient of two successive superior highly composite numbers is a prime number.

Superior highly composite radices

The first few superior highly composite numbers have often been used as radices, due to their high divisibility for their size. For example:
120 appears as the long hundred, while 360 appears as the number of degrees in a circle.