English

Hook length biases in ordinary and $t$-regular partitions

Combinatorics 2024-05-30 v2 Number Theory

Abstract

In this article, we study hook lengths of ordinary partitions and tt-regular partitions. We establish hook length biases for the ordinary partitions and motivated by them we find a few interesting hook length biases in 22-regular partitions. For a positive integer kk, let p(k)(n)p_{(k)}(n) denote the number of hooks of length kk in all the partitions of nn. We prove that p(k)(n)p(k+1)(n)p_{(k)}(n)\geq p_{(k+1)}(n) for all n0n\geq0 and nk+1n\ne k+1; and p(k)(k+1)p(k+1)(k+1)=1p_{(k)}(k+1)- p_{(k+1)}(k+1)=-1 for k2k\geq 2. For integers t2t\geq2 and k1k\geq1, let bt,k(n)b_{t,k}(n) denote the number of hooks of length kk in all the tt-regular partitions of nn. We find generating functions of bt,k(n)b_{t,k}(n) for certain values of tt and kk. Exploring hook length biases for bt,k(n)b_{t,k}(n), we observe that in certain cases biases are opposite to the biases for ordinary partitions. We prove that b2,2(n)b2,1(n)b_{2,2}(n)\geq b_{2,1}(n) for all n>4n>4, whereas b2,2(n)b2,3(n)b_{2,2}(n)\geq b_{2,3}(n) for all n0n\geq 0. We also propose some conjectures on biases among bt,k(n)b_{t,k}(n).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.07485,
  title  = {Hook length biases in ordinary and $t$-regular partitions},
  author = {Gurinder Singh and Rupam Barman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07485},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

To appear at Journal of Number Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:50:43.326Z