We have not yet succeeded in showing that there are infinitely many near-perfect numbers.
But
we give
some
strong evidence
for this in Section 2, where we present various rules for constructing
near-perfect numbers analogous to Euclid’s rule for
constructing even
perfect numbers. In Section 3,
we present an upper bound
on the count of
the near-perfect numbers:
The number of
such integers in
[1, x] is at most x5/6+o(1)
, as x → ∞. We conclude the paper by considering what we call k-near-perfect
numbers, where the definition of near-perfect is relaxed to allow up to k redundant divisors.