English

A probabilistic approach to the Erd\"os-Kac theorem for additive functions

Probability 2021-02-11 v1 Number Theory

Abstract

We present a new perspective of assessing the rates of convergence to the Gaussian and Poisson distributions in the Erd\"os-Kac theorem for additive arithmetic functions ψ\psi of a random integer JnJ_n uniformly distributed over {1,...,n}\{1,...,n\}. Our approach is probabilistic, working directly on spaces of random variables without any use of Fourier analytic methods, and our ψ\psi is more general than those considered in the literature. Our main results are (i) bounds on the Kolmogorov distance and Wasserstein distance between the distribution of the normalized ψ(Jn)\psi(J_n) and the standard Gaussian distribution, and (ii) bounds on the Kolmogorov distance and total variation distance between the distribution of ψ(Jn)\psi(J_n) and a Poisson distribution under mild additional assumptions on ψ\psi. Our results generalize the existing ones in the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.05094,
  title  = {A probabilistic approach to the Erd\"os-Kac theorem for additive functions},
  author = {Louis H. Y. Chen and Arturo Jaramillo and Xiaochuan Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.05094},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:59:48.997Z