Applications of the Wulff construction to number theory (Q2577582)

This paper deals with the asymptotic enumeration of partitions and plane partitions of a positive integer \(N\). A partition of \(N\) is geometrically interpreted as a Young diagram with \(N\) cells. In a similar way, a plane partition of \(N\) can be viewed as a 3D Young diagram (skycraper) with \(N\) cells. Denote the sets of partitions and plane partitions of \(N\) by \(\mathcal{Y}\)\(_N\) and \(\mathcal{S}\)\(_N\), respectively. In the present paper the author uses results describing the shape of typical (with respect to the uniform distribution) Young and 3D Young diagrams and shows that \(\ln|\mathcal{Y}_N|\sim\pi(2/3)^{1/2}N^{1/2}\) and \(\ln|\mathcal{S}_N|\sim 3[\zeta(3)]^{1/3}N^{2/3}\) as \(N\to\infty\). Here \(\zeta(s)\) denotes Riemann's zeta-function. The proofs are based on applications of geometric constructions of solutions of some variational maximizing problems.