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Cycle lengths in a permutation are typically Poisson. (English) Zbl 1171.05001

Summary: 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.

MSC:

05A05 Permutations, words, matrices
60C05 Combinatorial probability