Monday, 8 November 2010

nt.number theory - Are there pairs of consecutive integers with the same sum of factors?

Background/Motivation



I was planning to explain Ruth-Aaron pairs to my son, but it took me a few moments to remember the definition. Along the way, I thought of the mis-definition, a pair of consecutive numbers with the same sum of divisors. Well, that's actually two definitions, depending on whether you are looking only at proper divisors. Suppose all divisors. I quickly found (14,15) which both have a divisor sum (sigma function) of 24. Some more work provided (206,207) and then a search on OEIS gave sequence A002961.



What about proper divisors only? (2,3) comes quickly, but then nothing for a while. Noting that the parity of this value ($sigma(n) -n$) is the same as that of $n$ unless $n$ is a square or twice a square, any solution pair must include one number of that form. With that much information in hand, I posted this problem at the reference desk on Wikipedia. User PrimeHunter determined that there were no solutions up to $10^{12}$, but there were no general responses.



Aside from the parity issue, I haven't found other individual constraints that would filter the candidates--the number of adjacent values identical modulo $p$ for other small primes is at least as great as would be expected by chance, and there are a fair number of pairs that are arithmetically close.




Other than (2,3), are there pairs of consecutive integers such that $sigma(n)-n = sigma(n+1)-(n+1)$?


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