Tuesday, Feb. 14, 1:55 pm, 339 Little


Title:
Serendipity and partitions with initial repetitions

Speaker:        George E. Andrews (PSU, Math)

Abstract:  An enquiry by an engineer led by a circuitous route to the
topic of this talk. A variety of interesting connections with modular forms, mock
theta functions and Rogers-Ramanujan type identities arise in consideration of
partitions in which the smaller integers are repeated as summands more
often than the larger summands. In particular, this concept leads to a new
interpretation of the Rogers-Selberg identities and Bailey's modulus 9
identities. This latter interpretation suggests some thoughts on the
Borwein conjecture.