Chandrasekhar Hall

Pingala's Meru Prastaara, Integer Partitions, and Young's Lattice

Amritanshu Prasad

IMSc

Pingala introduced the Meru Prastaara (often called Pascal's triangle) in
his study of prosody about 2300 years ago. Revisiting Pingala's original
ideas leads to a better understanding of binomial coefficients and
identities involving them. Integer Partitions are mathematical structures
that were first studied by Euler, and obsessed Ramanujan. An analogous
structure for the study of Integer Partitions is Young's lattice. This
structure leads to interesting research questions even today.