On the Andrews-Stanley Refinement of Ramanujan's Partition Congruence Modulo 5 and Generalizations

Alexander Berkovich, Frank G. Garvan

Published 2004-02-26Version 1

In a recent study of sign-balanced, labelled posets Stanley, introduced a new integral partition statistic srank(pi) = O(pi) - O(pi'), where O(pi) denotes the number of odd parts of the partition pi and pi' is the conjugate of pi. Andrews proved the following refinement of Ramanujan's partition congruence mod 5: p[0](5n +4) = p[2](5n + 4) = 0 (mod 5), p(n) = p[0](n) + p[2](n), where p[i](n) (i = 0; 2) denotes the number of partitions of n with srank = i (mod 4) and p(n) is the number of unrestricted partitions of n. Andrews asked for a partition statistic that would divide the partitions enumerated by p[i](5n + 4) (i = 0, 2) into five equinumerous classes. In this paper we discuss three such statistics: the St-crank, the 2-quotient-rank and the 5-core-crank. The first one, while new, is intimately related to the Andrews-Garvan crank. The second one is in terms of the 2-quotient of a partition. The third one was introduced by Garvan, Kim and Stanton. We use it in our combinatorial proof of the Andrews refinement. Remarkably, the Andrews result is a simple consequence of a stronger refinement of Ramanujan's congruence mod 5. This more general refinement uses a new partition statistic which we term the BG-rank. We employ the BG-rank to prove new partition congruences modulo 5. Finally, we discuss some new formulas for partitions that are 5-cores and discuss an intriguing relation between 3-cores and the Andrews-Garvan crank.