Balanced Partitions

A famous theorem of Euler asserts that there are as many partitions of n into distinct parts as there are partitions into odd parts. We begin by establishing a less well-known companion result, which states that both of these quantities are equal to the number of partitions of n into even parts along with exactly one triangular part. We then introduce the characteristic of a partition, which is determined in a simple way by the placement of odd parts within the list of all parts. This leads to a refinement of the aforementioned result in the form of a new type of partition identity involving characteristic, distinct parts, even parts, and triangular numbers. Our primary purpose is to present a bijective proof of the central instance of this new type of identity, which concerns balanced partitions—partitions in which odd parts occupy as many even as odd positions within the list of all parts. The bijection is accomplished by means of a construction that converts balanced partitions of 2n into unrestricted partitions of n via a pairing of the squares in the Young tableau.