I am looking for the number of partitions of some number $n$ into $k$ parts. Following the Wikipedia article on partitions, I ended up with Andrew's book [1]. Judging by Google's preview Chapter 3 seems to contain information about what I need; unfortunately, the preview contains only one page of that chapter. Our library does not have a copy available either.
Even though there may not be an answer for me there I'd like to check available results. Since I can not access the reference list of said chapter: which papers is Andrew's chapter based upon?
Are there other (newer?) books or articles that contain relevant information?
- The Theory of Partitions by George E. Andrews (1976)
$\newcommand{\partition}[2]{\genfrac{\lvert}{\rvert}{0pt}{}{#1}{#2}}$ I was not able to track down Andrew's references yet, but I found the following.
Knuth [1, p399] gives as ordinary generating function
$\qquad\displaystyle \sum_{n \geq 0}\ \partition{n}{k} = \frac{z^k}{(1-z)(1-z^2) \cdot \dots \cdot (1-z^k)}$
where $\partition{n}{k}$ is the number of partitions of $n$ into (exactly) $k$ parts.
Flajolet/Sedgewick [2, p47] give the asymptotic
$\qquad\displaystyle [z^n]\frac{1}{(1-z)(1-z^2) \cdot \dots \cdot (1-z^k)} \sim \frac{n^{k-1}}{k!(k-1)!}$,
for the number of partitions of $n$ with at most $k$ parts.
Put together, this gives
$\qquad\displaystyle \partition{n}{k} \sim \frac{(n-k)^{k-1}}{k!(k-1)!}$;
this may be the best known result.