English

Glaisher's divisors and infinite products

Number Theory 2022-08-03 v2

Abstract

Ramanujan gave a recurrence relation for the partition function in terms of the sum of the divisor function σ(n)\sigma(n). In 1885, J.W. Glaisher considered seven divisor sums closely related to the sum of the divisors function. We develop a calculus to associate a generating function with each of these divisor sums. This yields analogues of Ramanujan's recurrence relation for several partition-theoretic functions as well as rk(n)r_k(n) and tk(n)t_k(n), functions counting the number of ways of writing a number as a sum of squares (respectively, triangular) numbers. As by-products of this association, we obtain several convolutions, recurrences and congruences for divisor functions. We give alternate proofs of two classical theorems, one due to Legendre and the other -- Ramanujan's congruence p(5n+4)0(mod5)p(5n+4) \equiv 0 \pmod 5.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.10804,
  title  = {Glaisher's divisors and infinite products},
  author = {Hartosh Singh Bal and Gaurav Bhatnagar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10804},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

17 pages. Second version with substantial additions to the number of results