2006The Electronic Journal of CombinatoricsOpen access

Cycle Lengths in a Permutation are Typically Poisson

Andrew Granville

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Abstract

The set of cycle lengths of almost all permutations in $S_n$ are "Poisson distributed": we show that this remains true even when we restrict the number of cycles in the permutation. The formulas we develop allow us to also show that almost all permutations with a given number of cycles have a certain "normal order" (in the spirit of the Erdős-Turán theorem). Our results were inspired by analogous questions about the size of the prime divisors of "typical" integers.

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The set of cycle lengths of almost all permutations in $S_n$ are "Poisson distributed": we show that this remains true even when we restrict the number of cycles in the permutation. The formulas we develop allow us to also show that almost all permutations with a given number of cycles have a certain "normal order" (in the spirit of the Erdős-Turán theorem). Our results were inspired by analogous questions about the size of the prime divisors of "typical" integers.

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Available abstract

The set of cycle lengths of almost all permutations in $S_n$ are "Poisson distributed": we show that this remains true even when we restrict the number of cycles in the permutation. The formulas we develop allow us to also show that almost all permutations with a given number of cycles have a certain "normal order" (in the spirit of the Erdős-Turán theorem). Our results were inspired by analogous questions about the size of the prime divisors of "typical" integers.

Key concepts: Mathematics, Permutation (music), Combinatorics, Poisson distribution, Set (abstract data type), Order (exchange), Parity of a permutation, Prime (order theory)

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