Let be the number to partition 2013 into an ordered tuple of prime numbers? What is ? If your answer is and the correct answer is , then your score on this problem will be or zero, whichever is larger.
Solution
We use the following facts and heuristics. (1) The ordered partitions of into any positive integers (not just primes) is . This can be guessed by checking small cases and finding a pattern, and is not difficult to prove. (2) The partitions of into any positive integers equals the partitions of 2013 into integers from the set . (3) The small numbers matter more when considering partitions. (4) The set of primes is close in size (near the small numbers) to or . (5) The prime numbers get very sparse compared to the above two sets in the larger numbers. Thus, using these heuristics, the number of partitions of 2013 into primes is approximately or , which, taking logarithms, give 670 and 1005.5, respectively. By (5), we should estimate something that is slightly less than these numbers.