Strange expectations and simultaneous cores

Let \(\gcd (a,b)=1\). J. Olsson and D. Stanton proved that the maximum number of boxes in a simultaneous (a, b)-core is

$$\begin{aligned} \max _{\lambda \in {\mathrm {core}}(a,b)} (\mathsf{size}(\lambda )) = \frac{(a^2-1)(b^2-1)}{24} \end{aligned}$$

and that this maximum is achieved by a unique core. P. Johnson combined Ehrhart theory with the polynomial method to prove D. Armstrong’s conjecture that the expected number of boxes in a simultaneous (a, b)-core is

$$\begin{aligned} \mathop {\mathbb {E}}\limits _{\lambda \in {\mathrm {core}}(a,b)}\left( \mathsf{size}(\lambda )\right) = \frac{(a-1)(b-1)(a+b+1)}{24}. \end{aligned}$$

We extend Johnson’s method to compute the variance to be

$$\begin{aligned} \mathop {\mathbb {V}}\limits _{\lambda \in {\mathrm {core}}(a,b)}\left( \mathsf{size}(\lambda )\right) = \frac{ab(a-1)(b-1)(a+b)(a+b+1)}{1440}, \end{aligned}$$

and also prove polynomiality of all moments. By extending the definitions of “simultaneous cores” and “number of boxes” to affine Weyl groups, we give uniform generalizations of all three formulae above to simply laced affine types. We further explain the appearance of the number 24 using the “strange formula” of H. Freudenthal and H. de Vries.