A variation of the Andrews–Stanley partition function and two interesting q-series identities

Abstract

Stanley introduced a partition statistic $$srank (\pi )=\mathcal {O}(\pi )-\mathcal {O}(\pi ')$$ , where $$\mathcal {O}(\pi )$$ denote the number of odd parts of the partition $$\pi $$ , and $$\pi '$$ is the conjugate of $$\pi $$ . Let $$p_i(n)$$ denote the number of partitions of n with srank $$\equiv i\pmod 4$$ . Andrews proved the following refinement of Ramanujan’s partition congruence modulo 5: $$\begin{aligned} p_0(5n+4)\equiv p_2(5n+4)\equiv 0\pmod 5. \end{aligned}$$ In this paper, we consider an analogous partition statistic $$\begin{aligned} lrank (\pi )=\mathcal {O}(\pi )+\mathcal {O}(\pi '). \end{aligned}$$ Let $$p_i^+(n)$$ denote the number of partitions of n with lrank $$\equiv i \pmod 4$$ . We will establish the generating functions of $$p_0^+(n)$$ and $$p_2^+(n)$$ and show that they satisfy similar properties to $$p_i(n)$$ . We also utilize a pair of interesting q-series identities to obtain a direct proof of the congruences $$\begin{aligned} p_0^+(5n+4)\equiv p_2^+(5n+4)\equiv 0\pmod 5. \end{aligned}$$