Generating Functions for Certain Weighted Cranks

Recently, George Beck posed many interesting partition problems considering the number of ones in partitions. In this paper, we first consider the crank generating function weighted by the number of ones and obtain analytic formulas for this weighted crank function under conditions of the crank being less than or equal to some specific integer. We connect these cumulative and point crank functions to the generating functions of partitions with certain sizes of Durfee rectangles. We then consider a generalization of the crank for k-colored partitions, which was first introduced by Fu and Tang, and investigate the corresponding generating function for this crank weighted by the number of parts in the first subpartition of a k-colored partition. We show that the cumulative generating functions are the same as the generating functions for certain unimodal sequences.