Hermite-Jensen limits and $d$ log-concavity of $q$-multinomials
Abstract
In 1878, Sylvester proved Cayley's Conjecture that the coefficients of the Gaussian -binomial coefficients are unimodal. In 1990, O'Hara famously discovered a constructive combinatorial proof, and in 2013, Pak and Panova proved the stronger property of strict unimodality for sufficiently large parameters. We move from unimodality to log-concavity and higher degree log-concavity, known as Tur\'an inequalities. Although -binomial coefficients are not always log- or degree log-concave, it's natural to ask to what extent these inequalities hold. In infinite families with limiting aspect ratio bounded away from zero and one, we prove that these stronger inequalities hold uniformly, for each on the central window where and are the mean and standard deviation of the normalized distribution. More generally, we obtain the same conclusions for -multinomial coefficients. These results stem from the asymptotic behavior of normalized Jensen polynomials, which are approximated by Hermite polynomials.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.02628,
title = {Hermite-Jensen limits and $d$ log-concavity of $q$-multinomials},
author = {Ken Ono},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.02628},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
This version addresses minor comments suggested by two anonymous referees. The most significant change is the addition of a new paragraph which describes Petrov's method for Edgeworth expansions which is used in the paper. This paragraph offers friendly exposition for readers unfamiliar with the method