Crank of a partition

In number theory, the crank of a partition of an integer is a certain integer associated with the partition. The term was first introduced without a definition by Freeman Dyson in a 1944 paper published in Eureka, a journal published by the Mathematics Society of Cambridge University. Dyson then gave a list of properties this yet-to-be-defined quantity should have. In 1988, George E. Andrews and Frank Garvan discovered a definition for the crank satisfying the properties hypothesized for it by Dyson.

Let n be a non-negative integer and let p(n) denote the number of partitions of n (p(0) is defined to be 1). Srinivasa Ramanujan in a paper published in 1918 stated and proved the following congruences for the partition function p(n), since known as Ramanujan congruences.

These congruences imply that partitions of numbers of the form 5n + 4 (respectively, of the forms 7n + 5 and 11n + 6 ) can be divided into 5 (respectively, 7 and 11) subclasses of equal size. The then known proofs of these congruences were based on the ideas of generating functions and they did not specify a method for the division of the partitions into subclasses of equal size.

In his Eureka paper Dyson proposed the concept of the rank of a partition. The rank of a partition is the integer obtained by subtracting the number of parts in the partition from the largest part in the partition. For example, the rank of the partition λ = { 4, 2, 1, 1, 1 } of 9 is 4 − 5 = − 1. Denoting by N(m, q, n), the number of partitions of n whose ranks are congruent to m modulo q, Dyson considered N(m, 5, 5 n + 4) and N(m, 7, 7n + 5) for various values of n and m. Based on empirical evidences Dyson formulated the following conjectures known as rank conjectures.

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