Exact formulae for the fractional partition functions

Abstract The partition function p(n) has been a testing ground for applications of analytic number theory to combinatorics. In particular, Hardy and Ramanujan invented the “circle method” to estimate the size of p(n), which was later perfected by Rademacher who obtained an exact formula. Recently,...

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Bibliografske podrobnosti
Main Authors: Iskander, Jonas, Jain, Vanshika, Talvola, Victoria
Drugi avtorji: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Format: Article
Jezik:English
Izdano: Springer International Publishing 2021
Online dostop:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131477
Opis
Izvleček:Abstract The partition function p(n) has been a testing ground for applications of analytic number theory to combinatorics. In particular, Hardy and Ramanujan invented the “circle method” to estimate the size of p(n), which was later perfected by Rademacher who obtained an exact formula. Recently, Chan and Wang considered the fractional partition functions, defined for $$\alpha \in {\mathbb {Q}}$$α∈Q by $$\sum _{n = 0}^\infty p_{\alpha }(n)x^n := \prod _{k=1}^\infty (1-x^k)^{-\alpha }$$∑n=0∞pα(n)xn:=∏k=1∞(1-xk)-α. In this paper we use the Rademacher circle method to find an exact formula for $$p_\alpha (n)$$pα(n) and study its implications, including log-concavity and the higher-order generalizations (i.e., the Turán inequalities) that $$p_\alpha (n)$$pα(n) satisfies.