Cameron's Blog - Perfect Numbers
Perfect Numbers      Aug 15, 2017

I just started reading a book called How to Prove It: A Structured Approach, a book all about writing and understanding proofs. My unconventional background in mathematics means that I have a fair bit of terror when it comes to proofs; they have often come up on more quantitative finance courses in a tangential manner, as the proofs are often unnessecary. The fact remains that I am terrified by them, and wanted to get over my fear of proofs.

In the process, I read a bit on perfect numbers. One of the proofs in the book was Euclid’s proof about infinite primes, and I figured I should write a little bit of code to find perfect numbers, for gits and shiggles.

Here’s the code to compute aliquot sums in Julia, a necessary intermediate step in perfect number evaluation.

using Primes

function aliquot(x::Int64, verbose=false)
divisors = []
for i in 1:x-1
if(x%i == 0)
append!(divisors, i)
end
end
if verbose == true print(divisors) end
return sum(divisors)
end

This is a function for computing the next prime number after integer $x$.

function next_perfect(x::Int64, limit=Inf64)
# Given a number, find the next highest perfect number.
found = false
while(found==false)
# You can set a computational limit with the 'limit' argument.
if (x >= limit) break end
if aliquot(x) == x
print(x, " is the next perfect number.")
found=true
break
end
x += 1
end
return x
end