English

Pentagonal number recurrence relations for $p(n)$

Number Theory 2025-04-22 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

We revisit Euler's partition function recurrence, which asserts, for integers n1,n\geq 1, that p(n)=p(n1)+p(n2)p(n5)p(n7)+=kZ{0}(1)k+1p(nω(k)), p(n)=p(n-1)+p(n-2)-p(n-5)-p(n-7)+\dots = \sum_{k\in \mathbb{Z}\setminus \{0\}} (-1)^{k+1} p(n-\omega(k)), where ω(m):=(3m2+m)/2\omega(m):=(3m^2+m)/2 is the mmth pentagonal number. We prove that this classical result is the ν=0\nu=0 case of an infinite family of ``pentagonal number'' recurrences. For each ν0,\nu\geq 0, we prove for positive nn that p(n)=1gν(n,0)(ανσ2ν1(n)+Tr2ν(n)+kZ{0}(1)k+1gν(n,k)p(nω(k))), p(n)=\frac{1}{g_{\nu}(n,0)}\left(\alpha_{\nu}\cdot \sigma_{2\nu-1}(n)+ \mathrm{Tr}_{2\nu}(n) +\sum_{k\in \mathbb{Z}\setminus \{0\}} (-1)^{k+1} g_{\nu}(n,k)\cdot p(n-\omega(k))\right), where σ2ν1(n)\sigma_{2\nu-1}(n) is a divisor function, Tr2ν(n)\mathrm{Tr}_{2\nu}(n) is the nnth weight 2ν2\nu Hecke trace of values of special twisted quadratic Dirichlet series, and each gν(n,k)g_{\nu}(n,k) is a polynomial in nn and k.k. The ν=6\nu=6 case can be viewed as a partition theoretic formula for Ramanujan's tau-function, as we have Tr12(n)=33108590592691τ(n). \mathrm{Tr}_{12}(n)=-\frac{33108590592}{691}\cdot \tau(n).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.16968,
  title  = {Pentagonal number recurrence relations for $p(n)$},
  author = {Kevin Gomez and Ken Ono and Hasan Saad and Ajit Singh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.16968},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

A few minor typos corrected. This paper will appear in Advances in Mathematics

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:12:23.480Z