Answering a question of Erdős, we show that a positive proportion of even numbers are in the form s(n), where s(n) = σ(n) - n, the sum of proper divisors of n.

We establish a general mean value result for arithmetic functions over short intervals with the Selberg-Delange method. As an application, we generalize the Deshouillers-Dress-Tenenbaum arcsine law on divisors to the short interval case.

The present paper deals with the summatory function of functions acting on the digits of an $q$-ary expansion. In particular let $n$ be a positive integer, then we call$$\begin{array}{c}n=\sum _{r=0}^{\ell }{d}_r\left(n\right)q^r\text{with}{d}_r\left(n\right)\in \{0,...,q-1\}\end{array}$$its $q$-ary expansion. We call a function $f$strictly $q$-additive, if for a given value, it acts only on the digits of its representation, i.e.,$$f\left(n\right)=\sum _{r=0}^{\ell }f\left(d_r\left(n\right)\right).$$Let $p\left(x\right)={\alpha }_0{x}^{{\beta }_0}+\cdots +{\alpha }_d{x}^{{\beta }_d}$ with ${\alpha }_0,{\alpha }_1,...,{\alpha }_d,\in ℝ$, ${\alpha }_0\>0$, ${\beta }_0\>\cdots \>{\beta }_d\ge 1$ and at least one ${\beta }_i\notin \mathbb{Z}$. Then we call $p$ a pseudo-polynomial.The goal is to prove that for a $q$-additive function $f$ there exists an $\epsilon \>0$ such that$$\begin{array}{c}\sum _{n\le N}f\left(⌊p\left(n\right)⌋\right)={\mu }_{f}N{log}_q\left(p\left(N\right)\right)\hfill \\ \hfill +N{F}_{f,{\beta }_0}\left({log}_q\left(p\left(N\right)\right)\right)+𝒪\left(N^{1-\epsilon }\right),\end{array}$$where ${\mu }_f$ is the mean of the values of $f$...