congruences in ordered pairs of partitions刻画在下令对分区.pdfVIP

IJMMS 2004:47, 2509–2512 PII. S0161171204311439 © Hindawi Publishing Corp. CONGRUENCES IN ORDERED PAIRS OF PARTITIONS PAUL HAMMOND and RICHARD LEWIS Received 28 November 2003 and in revised form 12 December 2003 Dyson defined the rank of a partition (as the first part minus the number of parts) whilst investigating certain congruences in the sequence p−1 (n). The rank has been widely studied as have been other statistics, such as the crank. In this paper a “birank” is defined which relates to ordered pairs of partitions, and is used in an elementary proof of a congruence in p−2 (n). 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 05A17, 11P81, 11P83. 1. Introducing the birank. A partition is defined as being a nonincreasing sequence of positive integers, λ = (λ ,λ ,...,λ ). The set of all partitions, which includes the 1 2 r empty partition ∅, is denoted by . The sum of the parts of a given partition is called the weight of the partition, wt (λ) = λ1 + λ2 + ···+λr . It is standard notation to write t n −k (z; q)∞ := t≥0 (1 − zq ) and p−k (n) for the coefficient of q in (q; q)∞ , for fixed k. It is easy to show that the number of partitions of weight n is p−1 (n) (for the empty partition, wt (λ) = 0). It is also easy to show that the number of ordered pairs of parti- tions of weight n is p−2 (n), the weight of an ordered pair being defined as the sum of the weights of the two partitions in the pair. The sequence p−1 (n) is known to satisfy certain congruences, one of which p−1 (5n +4) ≡ 0mod5, (1.1) was noticed, and first proved, by Ramanujan (see [ 7]). In fact (1.1) is [6, Theorem 359], where an elementary proof i