Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js
Ask Your Question

Revision history [back]

click to hide/show revision 1
initial version

Log concavity of the power partition function

Recently I proved that the power partition function is log concave. The power partition function (usually denoted Pk(n)) counts the number of ways to partition an integer into perfect kth powers. Log concavity means for a sequence a(n), we have that a(n)2>a(n1)a(n+1).

I know that for every k there is some Nk such that for all n>Nk the power partition function is log concave. What I want is to know the smallest such Nk.

Right now, I only know the smallest Nk for the first three powers:

k=1N1=25

k=2N1=1024

k=3N1=15656

I brute forced this in mathematica, but I cannot go any further. When looking, I moved all the terms of the inequality to the left and waited for the graph to always be positive.

Pk(n)Pk(n1)Pk(n+1)>0

The function toggles between positive and negative values until it is eventually always positive. Capturing the last negative term in the sequence gives the smallest Nk. I waited for about 50 terms in a row to be positive and then looked backwards and the last negative term. But my method takes too long now.

Can anyone think of a faster way to return the smallest Nk for k=4 or 5?