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A partition of a positive integer n can be visualised as a Young diagram: a configuration of n 2d boxes lying in the corner of the page. The count of partitions of natural numbers are encoded in Euler's partition function; this is the formal power series in t, having as its t^n coefficient the number of partitions of n. As well as having an elegant infinite product presentation, this partition function is related to the cohomology of Hilb_n(C^2). This is the space of colength n ideals in the polynomial algebra in two generators, which is an important module in geometric representation theory.