Bottom Schur Functions

We give a basis for the space spanned by the sum ŝλ of the lowest degree terms in the expansion of the Schur symmetric functions sλ in terms of the power sum symmetric functions pμ, where deg(pi) = 1. These lowest degree terms correspond to minimal border strip tableaux of λ. The dimension of the space spanned by ŝλ, where λ is a partition of n, is equal to the number of partitions of n into parts differing by at least 2. Applying the Rogers-Ramanujan identity, the generating function also counts the number of partitions of n into parts 5k + 1 and 5k − 1. We also show that a symmetric function closely related to ŝλ has the same coefficients when expanded in terms of power sums or augmented monomial symmetric functions.