Cranks for Ramanujan-type congruences of \(k\)-colored partitions

Abstract

Dyson famously provided combinatorial explanations for Ramanujan's partition congruences modulo \(5\) and \(7\) via his rank function, and postulated that a statistic explaining all of Ramanujan's congruences modulo \(5\), \(7\), and \(11\) should exist. Garvan and Andrews-Garvan later discovered such a crank function, fulfilling Dyson's goal. Many further examples of congruences of partition functions are known in the literature. In this paper, we provide a framework for discovering and proving the existence of such statistics for families of congruences and partition functions. As a first example, we find a family of crank functions that simultaneously explains most known congruences for colored partition functions. The key insight is to utilize a powerful new theory of theta blocks due to Gritsenko, Skoruppa, and Zagier. The method used here should be useful in the study of other combinatorial functions.