Fractional partitions and conjectures of Chern–Fu–Tang and Heim–Neuhauser

Many papers have studied inequalities for partition functions. Recently, a number of papers have considered mixtures between additive and multiplicative behavior in such inequalities. In particular, Chern–Fu–Tang and Heim–Neuhauser gave conjectures on inequalities for coefficients of powers of the generating partition function. These conjectures were posed in the context of colored partitions and the Nekrasov–Okounkov formula. Here, we study the precise size of differences of products of two such coefficients. This allows us to prove the Chern–Fu–Tang conjecture and to show the Heim–Neuhauser conjecture in a certain range. The explicit error terms provided will also be useful in the future study of partition inequalities. These are laid out in a user-friendly way for the researcher in combinatorics interested in such analytic questions.

Bounds for d-distinct partitions

International audience Euler's identity and the Rogers-Ramanujan identities are perhaps the most famous results in the theory of partitions. According to them, 1-distinct and 2-distinct partitions of n are equinumerous with partitions of n into parts congruent to ±1 modulo 4 and partitions of n into parts congruent to ±1 modulo 5, respectively. Furthermore, their generating functions are modular functions up to multiplication by rational powers of q. For d ≥ 3, however, there is neither the same type of partition identity nor modularity for d-distinct partitions. Instead, there are partition inequalities and mock modularity related with d-distinct partitions. For example, the Alder-Andrews Theorem states that the number of d-distinct partitions of n is greater than or equal to the number of partitions of n into parts which are congruent to ±1 (mod d+3). In this note, we present the recent developments of generalizations and analogs of the Alder-Andrews Theorem and establish asymptotic lower and upper bounds for the d-distinct partitions. Using the asymptotic relations and data obtained from computation, we propose a conjecture on a partition inequality that gives an upper bound for d-distinct partitions. Specifically, for d ≥ 4, the number of d-distinct partitions of n is less than or equal to the number of partitions of n into parts congruent to ±1 (mod m), where m ≤ 2dπ^2 / [3 log^2 (d)+6 log d] .