More on partition asymptotics

In the previous post we described a fairly straightforward argument, using generating functions and the saddle-point bound, for giving an upper bound

on the partition function . In this post I’d like to record an elementary argument, making no use of generating functions, giving a lower bound of the form for some , which might help explain intuitively why this exponential-of-a-square-root rate of growth makes sense.

The starting point is to think of a partition of as a Young diagram of size , or equivalently (in French coordinates) as a lattice path from somewhere on the y-axis to somewhere on the x-axis, which only steps down or to the right, such that the area under the path is . Heuristically, if the path takes a total of steps then there are about such paths, and if the area under the path is then the length of the path should be about , so this already goes a long way towards explaining the exponential-of-a-square-root behavior.

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The man who knew partition asymptotics

(Part I of this post is here)

Let denote the partition function, which describes the number of ways to write as a sum of positive integers, ignoring order. In 1918 Hardy and Ramanujan proved that is given asymptotically by

.

This is a major plot point in the new Ramanujan movie, where Ramanujan conjectures this result and MacMahon challenges him by agreeing to compute and comparing it to what this approximation gives. In this post I’d like to describe how one might go about conjecturing this result up to a multiplicative constant; proving it is much harder.

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