Congruences like Atkin's for the partition function
Abstract
Let be the ordinary partition function. In the 1960s Atkin found a number of examples of congruences of the form where and are prime and ; these lie in two natural families distinguished by the square class of . In recent decades much work has been done to understand congruences of the form . It is now known that there are many such congruences when , that such congruences are scarce (if they exist at all) when , and that for such congruences exist only when . For congruences like Atkin's (when ), more examples have been found for but little else seems to be known. Here we use the theory of modular Galois representations to prove that for every prime , there are infinitely many congruences like Atkin's in the first natural family which he discovered and that for at least of the primes there are infinitely many congruences in the second family.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2112.09481,
title = {Congruences like Atkin's for the partition function},
author = {Scott Ahlgren and Patrick B. Allen and Shiang Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.09481},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Minor revisions to improve exposition