For example, 2 is untouchable because for every prime
,
and it is easy to see that
for every composite.
On the contrary, 10 is not untouchable because the proper divisors of 14
are 1, 2, and 7, and 1 + 2 + 7 = 10.
Erdős has proved that there are infinitely many untouchable numbers.
If, as it is conjectured, every even number is the sum of two
distinct primes,
,
, then 5 is the only odd untouchable number,
since every larger odd number can be espressed as
and thus
be equal to the sum of the proper divisors of
.
The first untouchable numbers are 2, 5, 52, 88, 96, 120, 124, 146, 162, 188, 206, 210, 216, 238, 246, 248, 262, 268, 276, 288, 290, 292, 304 more terms
You can download a text
file (untouchable_up1e6.txt) of 1.9 MB, containing a list of the 150232 untouchable numbers up to .