Distribution of the partition function modulo m

Abstract

Ramanujan (and others) proved that the partition function satisfies a number of striking congruences modulo powers of 5, 7 and 11. A number of further congruences were shown by the works of Atkin, O'Brien, and Newman. In this paper we prove that there are infinitely many such congruences for every prime modulus exceeding 3. In addition, we provide a simple criterion guaranteeing the truth of Newman's conjecture for any prime modulus exceeding 3 (recall that Newman's conjecture asserts that the partition function hits every residue class modulo a given integer M infinitely often).