$q$-rious and $q$-riouser

Abstract

Dick Askey is known not just for his beautiful mathematics and his many amazing theorems, but also for posing numerous interesting and important open problems. Dick being Dick, these problems are hardly ever isolated, and often intended to demonstrate the unity of analysis, number theory and combinatorics. We take the reader down the rabbit hole created by one such problem, published as Advanced Problem 6514 by the American Mathematical Monthly in April 1986.