On some claims in Ramanujan's `unpublished' manuscript on the partition and tau functions
Abstract
Towards the end of his life Ramanujan wrote a manuscript on properties of the partition and tau functions, some parts of which remained unpublished until very recently. Nevertheless, this manuscript gave rise to a lot of subsequent work. In it Ramanujan considers congruences for modulo some special primes q. He proves for example that . He defines if is not divisible by q and otherwise. He then typically writes: "It can be shown by transcendental methods that where r is any positive number" (after stating some weaker estimates for the above sum). The number is a positve rational number depending on q and for the positive number C Ramanujan usually wrote down an Euler product. In this paper it is shown that Ramanujan's claim for every and each of the special primes q is false. Furthermore, we correct a 1928 paper of Geraldine Stanley who claimed to have disproved Ramanujan's claim in case q=5.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.math/0201265,
title = {On some claims in Ramanujan's `unpublished' manuscript on the partition and tau functions},
author = {Pieter Moree},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0201265},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
14 pages, 1 table. Slightly revised version that will appear in The Ramanujan Journal