Hook length 2026-10-05
The hook length of cell in the Young diagram of a partition of an integer is the number of cells in its Young-diagram hook:
Here is the conjugate partition. There is one hook length for every cell, so the multiset of hook lengths has cardinality .
We use the abacus divisible-hook correspondence in its multiset form: the hook lengths of that are divisible by , divided by , form exactly the disjoint union of the multisets of hook lengths of the components of its quotient of a partition for modulus .
Iterating this correspondence gives, for every ,
as multisets. Each Young diagram has one hook for every cell, so the cardinality of the right-hand side is , the sum of the component sizes.
For any positive integer , its P-adic valuation is the number of positive for which . Summing this identity over hooks and interchanging the finite sums proves
Thus
The sums are finite because hook lengths are bounded by , and the total size at each level of the quotient tower of a partition decreases by at least a factor until it reaches zero.