Abstract. We discuss a generalization of partitions, called overpartitions, which have proven useful in several combinatorial studies of basic hypergeometric series. After showing how a number of finite products occurring in q-series have natural interpretations in terms of overpartitions, we present an introduction to their rich structure as revealed by q-series identities.
In a series of papers the first author and Ono connected the rank, a partition statistic introduced by Dyson, to weak Maass forms, a new class of functions which are related to modular forms. Naturally it is of wide interest to find other explicit examples of Maass forms. Here we construct a new infinite family of such forms, arising from overpartitions. As applications we obtain combinatorial decompositions of Ramanujan-type congruences for overpartitions as well as the modularity of rank differences in certain arithmetic progressions.
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