Recently, Keith used the theory of modular forms to study 9-regular partitions modulo 2 and 3. He obtained one infinite family of congruences modulo 3, and meanwhile proposed an analogous conjecture. In this note, we show that 9-regular partitions and 3-cores satisfy the same congruences modulo 3. Thus, we first derive several results on 3-cores, and then generalise Keith’s conjecture and get a stronger result, which implies that all of Keith’s results on congruences modulo 3 are consequences of our result.

In a recent paper, Calkin et al. [N. Calkin, N. Drake, K. James, S. Law, P. Lee, D. Penniston and J. Radder, ‘Divisibility properties of the 5-regular and 13-regular partition functions’, Integers8 (2008), #A60] used the theory of modular forms to examine 5-regular partitions modulo 2 and 13-regular partitions modulo 2 and 3; they obtained and conjectured various results. In this note, we use nothing more than Jacobi’s triple product identity to obtain results for 5-regular partitions that are stronger than those obtained by Calkin and his collaborators. We find infinitely many Ramanujan-type congruences for b5(n), and we prove the striking result that the number of 5-regular partitions of the number n is even for at least 75% of the positive integers n.