Related papers: Friedman vs P\'olya

Suppose we sequentially put $n$ balls into $n$ bins. If we put each ball into a random bin then the heaviest bin will contain ${\sim}\log n/\log\log n$ balls with high probability. However, Azar, Broder, Karlin and Upfal [SIAM J. Comput. 29…

Answering a question of Bona, it is shown that for n>1 the probability that 1 and 2 are in the same cycle of a product of two n-cycles on the set {1,2,...,n} is 1/2 if n is odd and 1/2 - 2/(n-1){n+2) if n is even. Another result concerns…

We review some facts, properties and applications of the urn of Hill, Lane and Sudderth, a paradigmatic model of stochastic process with memory where the urn evolution is as follows: consider an urn of given capacity, at each step a new…

We introduce the P\'olya Web, a system of coalescing random walks based on the classic P\'olya urn model. This construction serves as an analogue to the web of coalescing random walks studied by T\'oth and Werner (1998), replacing simple…

We deal with the distribution of the fractional parts of $p^{\lambda}$, $p$ running over the prime numbers and $\lambda$ being a fixed real number lying in the interval $(0,1)$. Roughly speaking, we study the following question: Given a…

A probabilistic characterization of the dominance partial order on the set of partitions is presented. This extends work in "Symmetric polynomials and symmetric mean inequalities". Electron. J. Combin., 20(3): Paper 34, 2013. Let $n$ be a…

For $n \geq 2$ we construct a measurable subset of the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that does not contain pairs of points at distance 1 and whose volume is greater than $(1/2)^n$ times the volume of the ball. This disproves a conjecture of…

We consider a game in which a blindfolded player attempts to set $n$ counters lying on the vertices of a rotating regular $n$-gon table simultaneously to $0$. When the counters count$\pmod{m}$ we simplify the argument of Bar Yehuda, Etzion,…

A classical result of K. L. Chung and W. Feller deals with the partial sums $S_k$ arising in a fair coin-tossing game. If $N_n$ is the number of "positive" terms among $S_1, S_2,\dots,S_n$ then the quantity $P(N_{2n}=2r)$ takes an elegant…

We study two models of the Majority problem. We are given n balls and an unknown coloring of them with two colors. We can ask sets of balls of size k as queries, and in the so-called General Model the answer to a query shows if all the…

Consider an urn model whose replacement matrix is triangular, has all entries nonnegative and the row sums are all equal to one. We obtain the strong laws for the counts of balls corresponding to each color. The scalings for these laws…

We re-confirm, for the case of the unit p-ball of R^n, one of recent conjectures of G.Kuperberg on centrally symmetric convex bodies.This conjecture was very recently confirmrd for this particular case by D.A.Gutierrez using polygamma…

Sufficient conditions are developed for a class of generalized Polya urn schemes ensuring exchangeability. The extended class includes the Blackwell-MacQueen Polya urn and the urn schemes for the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet process and…

Consider a balanced non triangular two-color P\'olya-Eggenberger urn process, assumed to be large which means that the ratio sigma of the replacement matrix eigenvalues satisfies 1/2<sigma <1. The composition vector of both discrete time…

The seminal result of Kahn, Kalai and Linial shows that a coalition of $O(\frac{n}{\log n})$ players can bias the outcome of any Boolean function $\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ with respect to the uniform measure. We extend their result to…

We consider a random generalisation of the classical Fibonacci substitution. The substitution we consider is defined as the rule mapping $\mathtt{a}\mapsto \mathtt{baa}$ and $\mathtt{b} \mapsto \mathtt{ab}$ with probability $p$ and…

Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…

We consider the occupancy problem where balls are thrown independently at infinitely many boxes with fixed positive frequencies. It is well known that the random number of boxes occupied by the first n balls is asymptotically normal if its…

We study P\'olya urns on hypergraphs and prove that, when the incidence matrix of the hypergraph is injective, there exists a point $v=v(H)$ such that the random process converges to $v$ almost surely. We also provide a partial result when…

The (strong) Bruhat order for permutations provides a partial ordering defined as follows: two permutations are comparable if one can be obtained from the other by a sequence of adjacent transpositions that each increase the number of…