• 1 Department of Mathematical Sciences [Matieland, Stellenbosch Uni.]

We assign a uniform probability to the set consisting of partitions of a positive integer $n$ such that the multiplicity of each summand is less than a given number $d$ and we study the limiting distribution of the number of summands in a random partition. It is known from a result by Erdős and Lehner published in 1941 that the distributions of the length in random restricted $(d=2)$ and random unrestricted $(d \geq n+1)$ partitions behave very differently. In this paper we show that as the bound $d$ increases we observe a phase transition in which the distribution goes from the Gaussian distribution of the restricted case to the Gumbel distribution of the unrestricted case.