Email Message (Dated Feb. 8, 2012) from Mark Ward to Daniel Kane and Doron Zeilberger

Dear Daniel and Doron,

The following email, written by Daniel and posted on Doron's webpage, came to my attention this morning:

http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimhtml/DanielKaneMessage.txt
It shows very succinctly that the exponent of the growth of the coefficients in Wilf's 6th problem is:

(6n)^{1/3} log(n)/3

I'm happy to see that Daniel made this observation.

I'm also pleased to report that Jim Fill, Svante Janson, and I (working together) independently made the same observation in November 2011, which we chose to write as a function of 6n, very similarly:

(6 n)^{1/3} \ln[(6 n)^{1/3}]

We haven't yet published our result, and indeed, we would like to know more. For instance, is it possible to get a first-order expression for not just the exponent, but for the growth of the coefficients themselves?

As Doron points out in his arxiv preprint:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.4093v1.pdf

and as Jim, Svante, and I discussed, it would probably be a result akin to the classic Hardy and Ramanujan (and, later, Rademacher refinement) of the asymptotic growth of the number of integer partitions.

I don't know if you are interested in pushing further on this problem, but I certainly am, and all would be welcome to join.

I am also copying Maciej Ireneusz Wilczynski, who derived the first 500+ terms (I had submitted 300 terms to Sloane last year, but I'm impressed that Maciej went way beyond this). I think he is also interested in a precise analysis of the asymptotics.

Best wishes to all,

Mark