Abstract

In 1944, Freeman Dyson conjectured the existence of a “crank” function for partitions that would provide a combinatorial result of Ramanujan’s congruence modulo 11. In 1988, Andrews and Garvan stated such functions and described the celebrated result that the crank simultaneously explains the three Ramanujan congruences modulo 5, 7 and 11. Dyson wrote the article, titled Some Guesses in the theory of partitions, for Eureka, the undergraduate mathematics journal of Cambridge. He discovered the many conjectures in this article by attempting to find a combinatorial explanation of Ramanujan’s famous congruences for P (n), the number of partitions of n indeed, Ramanujan’s formulas lay unread until 1976 when Dyson found In the Trainty College Library of Cambridge University among papers from the estate of the late G.N.Watson. In 1986, F.Garvan wrote his Pennsylvania state Ph.D. Thesis Precisely on the formulas of Ramanujan relative to the crank. In view of this theoretical description, the story of the crank is a long romantic tale and the crank functions are intimately connected to all partitions congruences. In 2005, Mahlburg stated that the crank functions themselves obey Ramanujan type congruences.

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