Highly Composite Numbers
July 12, 2016
[ Today’s exercise was written by Zacharias Voulgaris, based on a Numberphile video. Guest authors are always welcome; contact me if you wish to write an exercise. ]
A highly composite number, also called an anti-prime, is a number n for which d(m) < d(n) for all m < n, where d(x) is the divisor function that gives a count of the number of divisors of x; in other words, a highly composite number has more divisors than any smaller number. Thus, a highly composite number, which has many divisors, is the opposite of a prime number, which has only two divisors. The sequence of highly composite numbers, which begins 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 24, 36, … (A002182), has been studied by Ramanujan and Erdös, among others, and is a continuing object of study by number theorists. A famous highly composite number, known to Plato, is 5040.
Your task is to write a program that returns all highly composite numbers less than a given limit. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 