SOME OBSERVATIONS AND SPECULATIONS ON PARTITIONS INTO d-TH POWERS

Abstract

AbstractThe aim of this article is to provoke discussion concerning arithmetic properties of the function $p_{d}(n)$ counting partitions of a positive integer n into dth powers, where $d\geq 2$ . Apart from results concerning the asymptotic behaviour of $p_{d}(n)$ , little is known. In the first part of the paper, we prove certain congruences involving functions counting various types of partitions into dth powers. The second part of the paper is experimental and contains questions and conjectures concerning the arithmetic behaviour of the sequence $(p_{d}(n))_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$ , based on computations of $p_{d}(n)$ for $n\leq 10^5$ for $d=2$ and $n\leq 10^{6}$ for $d=3, 4, 5$ .