Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js

Sunday, 1 May 2016

Achilles Numbers, Powerful Numbers and Perfect Powers

Today I turned 24500 days old and an analysis of this number revealed that it was an Achilles number in the OEIS listings, specifically OEIS A203663: Achilles number whose double is also an Achilles number. The initial members of this sequence are listed as:

432, 972, 1944, 2000, 2700, 3456, 4500, 5292, 5400, 5488, 8748, 9000, 10584, 10800, 12348, 12500, 13068, 15552, 16000, 17496, 18000, 18252, 21168, 21296, 21600, 24300, 24500, 24696, 25000, 26136 

I'd not heard of an Achilles number before and so I investigated. Wikipedia provides this definition:
An Achilles number is a number that is powerful but not a perfect power. A positive integer n is a powerful number if, for every prime factor p of n, p2 is also a divisor. In other words, every prime factor appears at least squared in the factorisation. All Achilles numbers are powerful. However, not all powerful numbers are Achilles numbers: only those that cannot be represented as mk, where m and k are positive integers greater than 1.
Now 24500 factorises to 22×53×72 and is thus powerful but not a perfect power. So it is an Achilles number. Multiplication by 2 does not change this because 49000 factorises to 23×53×72 and again powerful but not a perfect power.

Here is the Wikipedia definition of a perfect power:
A perfect power is a positive integer that can be expressed as an integer power of another positive integer. More formally, n is a perfect power if there exist natural numbers m>1, and k>1 such that mk=n. In this case, n may be called a perfect k-th power. If k=2 or k=3, then n is called a perfect square or perfect cube, respectively. Sometimes 1 is also considered a perfect power (1k=1 for any k).

No comments:

Post a Comment