History
Colossally abundant numbers were first studied by Ramanujan and his findings were intended to be included in his 1915 paper on highly composite numbers. Unfortunately, the publisher of the journal to which Ramanujan submitted his work, the London Mathematical Society, was in financial difficulties at the time and Ramanujan agreed to remove aspects of the work in order to reduce the cost of printing. His findings were mostly conditional on the Riemann hypothesis and with this assumption he found upper and lower bounds for the size of colossally abundant numbers and proved that what would come to be known as Robin's inequality (see below) holds for all sufficiently large values of n.
The class of numbers was reconsidered in a slightly stronger form in a 1944 paper of Leonidas Alaoglu and Paul Erdős in which they tried to extend Ramanujan's results.
Read more about this topic: Colossally Abundant Number
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