Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T03:52:22.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

ON THE PARITY OF THE GENERALISED FROBENIUS PARTITION FUNCTIONS $\boldsymbol {\phi _k(n)}$

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2022

GEORGE E. ANDREWS
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA e-mail: [email protected]
JAMES A. SELLERS*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN 55812, USA
FARES SOUFAN
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN 55812, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Andrews [Generalized Frobenius Partitions, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 301 (American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1984)] defined two families of functions, $\phi _k(n)$ and $c\phi _k(n),$ enumerating two types of combinatorial objects which he called generalised Frobenius partitions. Andrews proved a number of Ramanujan-like congruences satisfied by specific functions within these two families. Numerous other authors proved similar results for these functions, often with a view towards a specific choice of the parameter $k.$ Our goal is to identify an infinite family of values of k such that $\phi _k(n)$ is even for all n in a specific arithmetic progression; in particular, we prove that, for all positive integers $\ell ,$ all primes $p\geq 5$ and all values $r, 0 < r < p,$ such that $24r+1$ is a quadratic nonresidue modulo $p,$

$$ \begin{align*} \phi_{p\ell-1}(pn+r) \equiv 0 \pmod{2} \end{align*} $$

for all $n\geq 0.$ Our proof of this result is truly elementary, relying on a lemma from Andrews’ memoir, classical q-series results and elementary generating function manipulations. Such a result, which holds for infinitely many values of $k,$ is rare in the study of arithmetic properties satisfied by generalised Frobenius partitions, primarily because of the unwieldy nature of the generating functions in question.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Australian Mathematical Publishing Association Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The first author was partially supported by Simons Foundation Grant 633284.

References

Andrews, G. E., Generalized Frobenius Partitions, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 301 (American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baruah, N. D. and Sarmah, B. K., ‘Congruences for generalized Frobenius partitions with 4 colors’, Discrete Math. 311 (2011), 18921902.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baruah, N. D. and Sarmah, B. K., ‘Generalized Frobenius partitions with 6 colors’, Ramanujan J. 38 (2015), 361382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chan, H. H., Wang, L. and Yang, Y., ‘Modular forms and $k$ -colored generalized Frobenius partitions’, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 371 (2020), 21592205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cui, S.-P. and Gu, N. S. S., ‘Congruences modulo powers of 2 for generalized Frobenius partitions with six colors’, Int. J. Number Theory 15 (2019), 11731181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cui, S.-P., Gu, N. S. S. and Huang, A. X., ‘Congruence properties for a certain kind of partition functions’, Adv. Math. 290 (2016), 739772.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garvan, F. G. and Sellers, J. A., ‘Congruences for generalized Frobenius partitions with an arbitrarily large number of colors’, Integers 14 (2014), Article no. A7.Google Scholar
Hirschhorn, M. D., The Power of $q{:}\ {}$ A Personal Journey, Developments in Mathematics, 49 (Springer, Cham, 2017).Google Scholar
Jameson, M. and Wieczorek, M., ‘Congruences for modular forms and generalized Frobenius partitions’, Ramanujan J. 52 (2020), 541553.CrossRefGoogle Scholar