Positive harmonic functions on the Heisenberg group

A harmonic function on a group is a function which is equal to the average of its translates, average with respect to a finitely supported measure. First, we will survey the history of this notion. Then we will describe the extremal non-negative harmonic functions on the Heisenberg group. We will see that the classical partition function occurs as such a function and that this function is the only one beyond harmonic characters.