A Double Bounded Version of Schur's Partition Theorem

Dedicated to the memory of Paul Erdős

Schur's partition theorem states that the number of partitions of n into distinct parts (mod 3) equals the number of partitions of n into parts which differ by 3, where the inequality is strict if a part is a multiple of 3. We establish a double bounded refined version of this theorem by imposing one bound on the parts (mod 3) and another on the parts (mod 3), and by keeping track of the number of parts in each of the residue classes (mod 3). Despite the long history of Schur's theorem, our result is new, and extends earlier work of Andrews, Alladi-Gordon and Bressoud. We give combinatorial and q-theoretic proofs of our result. The special case L=M leads to a representation of the generating function of the underlying partitions in terms of the q-trinomial coefficients extending a similar previous representation of Andrews.