The aim of this article is to provoke discussion concerning arithmetic properties of the function $p_{d}(n)$ counting partitions of a positive integer n into dth powers, where $d\geq 2$ . Apart from results concerning the asymptotic behaviour of $p_{d}(n)$ , little is known. In the first part of the paper, we prove certain congruences involving functions counting various types of partitions into dth powers. The second part of the paper is experimental and contains questions and conjectures concerning the arithmetic behaviour of the sequence $(p_{d}(n))_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$ , based on computations of $p_{d}(n)$ for $n\leq 10^5$ for $d=2$ and $n\leq 10^{6}$ for $d=3, 4, 5$ .

Gireesh and Mahadeva Naika [‘On 3-regular partitions in 3-colors’, Indian J. Pure Appl. Math.50 (2019), 137–148] proved an infinite family of congruences modulo powers of 3 for the function $p_{\{3,3\}}(n)$ , the number of 3-regular partitions in three colours. In this paper, using elementary generating function manipulations and classical techniques, we significantly extend the list of proven arithmetic properties satisfied by $p_{\{3,3\}}(n).$

Let n be a positive integer and let $\mathbb{F} _{q^n}$ be the finite field with $q^n$ elements, where q is a prime power. We introduce a natural action of the projective semilinear group ${\mathrm{P}\Gamma\mathrm{L}} (2, q^n)={\mathrm{PGL}} (2, q^n)\rtimes {\mathrm{Gal}} ({\mathbb F_{q^n}} /\mathbb{F} _q)$ on the set of monic irreducible polynomials over the finite field $\mathbb{F} _{q^n}$ . Our main results provide information on the characterisation and number of fixed points.

Andrews introduced the partition function $\overline {C}_{k, i}(n)$ , called the singular overpartition function, which counts the number of overpartitions of n in which no part is divisible by k and only parts $\equiv \pm i\pmod {k}$ may be overlined. We prove that $\overline {C}_{6, 2}(n)$ is almost always divisible by $2^k$ for any positive integer k. We also prove that $\overline {C}_{6, 2}(n)$ and $\overline {C}_{12, 4}(n)$ are almost always divisible by $3^k$ . Using a result of Ono and Taguchi on nilpotency of Hecke operators, we find infinite families of congruences modulo arbitrary powers of $2$ satisfied by $\overline {C}_{6, 2}(n)$ .

We construct some new deformation families of four-dimensional Fano manifolds of index one in some known classes of Gorenstein formats. These families have explicit descriptions in terms of equations, defining their image under the anticanonical embedding in some weighted projective space. They also have relatively smaller anticanonical degree than most other known families of smooth Fano 4-folds.

Without resorting to complex numbers or any advanced topological arguments, we show that any real polynomial of degree greater than two always has a real quadratic polynomial factor, which is equivalent to the fundamental theorem of algebra. The proof uses interlacing of bivariate polynomials similar to Gauss’s first proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra using complex numbers, but in a different context of division residues of strictly real polynomials. This shows the sufficiency of basic real analysis as the minimal platform to prove the fundamental theorem of algebra.

We introduce the $\textbf{h}$ -minimum spanning length of a family ${\mathcal A}$ of $n\times n$ matrices over a field $\mathbb F$ , where $\textbf{h}$ is a p-tuple of positive integers, each no more than n. For an algebraically closed field $\mathbb F$ , Burnside’s theorem on irreducibility is essentially that the $(n,n,\ldots ,n)$ -minimum spanning length of ${\mathcal A}$ exists if ${\mathcal A}$ is irreducible. We show that the $\textbf{h}$ -minimum spanning length of ${\mathcal A}$ exists for every $\textbf{h}=(h_1,h_2,\ldots , h_p)$ if ${\mathcal A}$ is an irreducible family of invertible matrices with at least three elements. The $(1,1, \ldots ,1)$ -minimum spanning length is at most $4n\log _{2} 2n+8n-3$ . Several examples are given, including one giving a complete calculation of the $(p,q)$ -minimum spanning length of the ordered pair $(J^*,J)$ , where J is the Jordan matrix.

We show that if ${\mathcal C}$ is a fusion $2$ -category in which the endomorphism category of the unit object is or , then the indecomposable objects of ${\mathcal C}$ form a finite group.

We study the discrete dynamics of standard (or left) polynomials $f(x)$ over division rings D. We define their fixed points to be the points $\lambda \in D$ for which $f^{\circ n}(\lambda )=\lambda $ for any $n \in \mathbb {N}$ , where $f^{\circ n}(x)$ is defined recursively by $f^{\circ n}(x)=f(f^{\circ (n-1)}(x))$ and $f^{\circ 1}(x)=f(x)$ . Periodic points are similarly defined. We prove that $\lambda $ is a fixed point of $f(x)$ if and only if $f(\lambda )=\lambda $ , which enables the use of known results from the theory of polynomial equations, to conclude that any polynomial of degree $m \geq 2$ has at most m conjugacy classes of fixed points. We also show that in general, periodic points do not behave as in the commutative case. We provide a sufficient condition for periodic points to behave as expected.

Let p be a prime and let $J_r$ denote a full $r \times r$ Jordan block matrix with eigenvalue $1$ over a field F of characteristic p. For positive integers r and s with $r \leq s$ , the Jordan canonical form of the $r s \times r s$ matrix $J_{r} \otimes J_{s}$ has the form $J_{\lambda _1} \oplus J_{\lambda _2} \oplus \cdots \oplus J_{\lambda _{r}}$ . This decomposition determines a partition $\lambda (r,s,p)=(\lambda _1,\lambda _2,\ldots , \lambda _{r})$ of $r s$ . Let $n_1, \ldots , n_k$ be the multiplicities of the distinct parts of the partition and set $c(r,s,p)=(n_1,\ldots ,n_k)$ . Then $c(r,s,p)$ is a composition of r. We present a new bottom-up algorithm for computing $c(r,s,p)$ and $\lambda (r,s,p)$ directly from the base-p expansions for r and s.

We give the construction of some locally indicable groups which are strongly bounded (every abstract action on a metric space has bounded orbits).

A graph $\Gamma $ is called $(G, s)$ -arc-transitive if $G \le \text{Aut} (\Gamma )$ is transitive on the set of vertices of $\Gamma $ and the set of s-arcs of $\Gamma $ , where for an integer $s \ge 1$ an s-arc of $\Gamma $ is a sequence of $s+1$ vertices $(v_0,v_1,\ldots ,v_s)$ of $\Gamma $ such that $v_{i-1}$ and $v_i$ are adjacent for $1 \le i \le s$ and $v_{i-1}\ne v_{i+1}$ for $1 \le i \le s-1$ . A graph $\Gamma $ is called 2-transitive if it is $(\text{Aut} (\Gamma ), 2)$ -arc-transitive but not $(\text{Aut} (\Gamma ), 3)$ -arc-transitive. A Cayley graph $\Gamma $ of a group G is called normal if G is normal in $\text{Aut} (\Gamma )$ and nonnormal otherwise. Fang et al. [‘On edge transitive Cayley graphs of valency four’, European J. Combin.25 (2004), 1103–1116] proved that if $\Gamma $ is a tetravalent 2-transitive Cayley graph of a finite simple group G, then either $\Gamma $ is normal or G is one of the groups $\text{PSL}_2(11)$ , ${\rm M} _{11}$ , $\text{M} _{23}$ and $A_{11}$ . However, it was unknown whether $\Gamma $ is normal when G is one of these four groups. We answer this question by proving that among these four groups only $\text{M} _{11}$ produces connected tetravalent 2-transitive nonnormal Cayley graphs. We prove further that there are exactly two such graphs which are nonisomorphic and both are determined in the paper. As a consequence, the automorphism group of any connected tetravalent 2-transitive Cayley graph of any finite simple group is determined.

For an infinite Toeplitz matrix T with nonnegative real entries we find the conditions under which the equation $\boldsymbol {x}=T\boldsymbol {x}$ , where $\boldsymbol {x}$ is an infinite vector column, has a nontrivial bounded positive solution. The problem studied in this paper is associated with the asymptotic behaviour of convolution-type recurrence relations and can be applied to problems arising in the theory of stochastic processes and other areas.

In this note we show that every element of a simple Suzuki group $^2B_2(q)$ is a commutator of elements of coprime orders.

Let R be a semiprime ring with extended centroid C and let $I(x)$ denote the set of all inner inverses of a regular element x in R. Given two regular elements $a, b$ in R, we characterise the existence of some $c\in R$ such that $I(a)+I(b)=I(c)$ . Precisely, if $a, b, a+b$ are regular elements of R and a and b are parallel summable with the parallel sum ${\cal P}(a, b)$ , then $I(a)+I(b)=I({\cal P}(a, b))$ . Conversely, if $I(a)+I(b)=I(c)$ for some $c\in R$ , then $\mathrm {E}[c]a(a+b)^{-}b$ is invariant for all $(a+b)^{-}\in I(a+b)$ , where $\mathrm {E}[c]$ is the smallest idempotent in C satisfying $c=\mathrm {E}[c]c$ . This extends earlier work of Mitra and Odell for matrix rings over a field and Hartwig for prime regular rings with unity and some recent results proved by Alahmadi et al. [‘Invariance and parallel sums’, Bull. Math. Sci.10(1) (2020), 2050001, 8 pages] concerning the parallel summability of unital prime rings and abelian regular rings.

Let G be a finite group and $\chi $ be a character of G. The codegree of $\chi $ is ${{\operatorname{codeg}}} (\chi ) ={|G: \ker \chi |}/{\chi (1)}$ . We write $\pi (G)$ for the set of prime divisors of $|G|$ , $\pi ({{\operatorname{codeg}}} (\chi ))$ for the set of prime divisors of ${{\operatorname{codeg}}} (\chi )$ and $\sigma ({{\operatorname{codeg}}} (G))= \max \{|\pi ({{\operatorname{codeg}}} (\chi ))| : \chi \in {\textrm {Irr}}(G)\}$ . We show that $|\pi (G)| \leq ({23}/{3}) \sigma ({{\operatorname{codeg}}} (G))$ . This improves the main result of Yang and Qian [‘The analog of Huppert’s conjecture on character codegrees’, J. Algebra478 (2017), 215–219].

For a finite group G, let $\Delta (G)$ denote the character graph built on the set of degrees of the irreducible complex characters of G. A perfect graph is a graph $\Gamma $ in which the chromatic number of every induced subgraph $\Delta $ of $\Gamma $ equals the clique number of $\Delta $ . We show that the character graph $\Delta (G)$ of a finite group G is always a perfect graph. We also prove that the chromatic number of the complement of $\Delta (G)$ is at most three.

Let G be a finite group, let ${\mathrm{Irr}}(G)$ be the set of all irreducible complex characters of G and let $\chi \in {\mathrm{Irr}}(G)$ . Define the codegrees, ${\mathrm{cod}}(\chi ) = |G: {\mathrm{ker}}\chi |/\chi (1)$ and ${\mathrm{cod}}(G) = \{{\mathrm{cod}}(\chi ) \mid \chi \in {\mathrm{Irr}}(G)\} $ . We show that the simple group ${\mathrm{PSL}}(2,q)$ , for a prime power $q>3$ , is uniquely determined by the set of its codegrees.

We prove that the invariably generating graph of a finite group can have an arbitrarily large number of connected components with at least two vertices.

We extend work of Berdinsky and Khoussainov [‘Cayley automatic representations of wreath products’, International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science27(2) (2016), 147–159] to show that being Cayley automatic is closed under taking the restricted wreath product with a virtually infinite cyclic group. This adds to the list of known examples of Cayley automatic groups.