English

Roots of Polynomials and The Derangement Problem

Number Theory 2019-12-03 v1 Probability

Abstract

We present a new killing-a-fly-with-a-sledgehammer proof of one of the oldest results in probability which says that the probability that a random permutation on nn elements has no fixed points tends to e1e^{-1} as nn tends to infinity. Our proof stems from the connection between permutations and polynomials over finite fields and is based on an independence argument, which is trivial in the polynomial world.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.01977,
  title  = {Roots of Polynomials and The Derangement Problem},
  author = {Lior Bary-Soroker and Ofir Gorodetsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.01977},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted to American Mathematical Monthly

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:13:00.282Z