The nature of partition bijections. I: Involutions (Q1883380)

By ``involution'', the author means a bijection from a non-empty set to itself that is its own inverse. In this article, which is largely a survey, the author presents both involutive and bijective proofs of a number of well-known identities from the theory of partitions, including Euler's pentagonal theorem, and the Jacobi triple product identity. In some cases, the author presents an original proof that generalizes prior known results by others. In addition, the author shows how an involution can be obtained from a bijection. A peculiarity of the author's is his avoidance of the customary use of numbers in referring to various identities. For this purpose, he prefers to use asterisks, circles, the symbols for the four suits in a standard deck of cards, etc.