English

Hook lengths in self-conjugate partitions

Combinatorics 2024-02-09 v3

Abstract

In 2010, G.-N. Han obtained the generating function for the number of size tt hooks among integer partitions. Here we obtain these generating functions for self-conjugate partitions, which are particularly elegant for even tt. If nt(λ)n_t(\lambda) is the number of size tt hooks in a partition λ,\lambda, then for even tt we have λSCxnt(λ)qλ=(q;q2)((1x2)q2t;q2t)t2.\sum_{\lambda\in \mathcal{SC}} x^{n_t(\lambda)} q^{\vert\lambda\vert} = (-q;q^2)_{\infty} \cdot ((1-x^2)q^{2t};q^{2t})_{\infty}^{\frac{t}2}. As a consequence, if at(n)a_t^*(n) is the number of such hooks among the self-conjugate partitions of n,n, then for even tt we obtain the simple formula at(n)=tj1q(n2tj), a_t^*(n)=t\sum_{j\geq 1} q^*(n-2tj), where q(m)q^*(m) is the number of partitions of mm into distinct odd parts. As a corollary, we find that tat(n),t\mid a_t^*(n), which confirms a conjecture of Ballantine, Burson, Craig, Folsom, and Wen.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.02933,
  title  = {Hook lengths in self-conjugate partitions},
  author = {Tewodros Amdeberhan and George E. Andrews and Ken Ono and Ajit Singh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.02933},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

12 pages; minor revision based on referee reports

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:41:55.949Z