For each n, let Xn ∈ {0, . . . , n} be a random variable with mean µn, standard deviation σn, and let Pn(z) = n k=0 P(Xn = k)z k , be its probability generating function. We show that if none of the complex zeros of the polynomials {Pn(z)} is contained in a neighbourhood of 1 ∈ C and σn > n ε for some ε > 0, then X * n = (Xn − µn)σ −1 n is asymptotically normal as n → ∞: that is tends in distribution to a random variable Z ∼ N (0, 1).Moreover, we show this result is sharp in the sense that there exist sequences of random variables {Xn} with σn > C log n for which Pn(z) has no roots near 1 and X * n is not asymptotically normal. These results disprove a conjecture of Pemantle and improve upon various results in the literature. We go on to prove several other results connecting the location of the zeros of Pn(z) and the distribution of the random variable Xn. 1 arXiv:1804.07696v2 [math.PR] 12 Jun 2018 P X (z) are non-negative. Hence, we may write P X (z) = n i=1 (q i z + 1 − q i ), for some q 1 , . . . q n ∈ [0, 1]. A little further thought reveals that this special expression for the probability generating function corresponds to an expression of X as a sum of independent random variables X = X 1 + · · · + X n , where X i is the {0, 1}-random variable, taking 1 with probability q i . Thus, with an appropriate central limit theorem at hand, we see that X must be approximately normal, provided the variance of X is sufficiently large. In other words, from this one piece of information (albeit a strong piece of information) about the zeros of P X (z), one can quickly deduce quite a bit of information about the distribution of X. The aim of this paper is to show that this assumption of real rootedness of P X (z) can be related quite considerably while yielding similar results. In particular, we give three different results each of which says that "if X has large variance and the roots of P X (z) avoid a region in the complex plane, then X is approximately normal."
HistoryBefore turning to our contributions, we take a brief moment to situate our results in an old and well-studied field centred around the following question: What does information about the coefficients of P (z) tell us about the distribution of the complex roots of P (and vice versa)? This question has a long and rich history, reaching back to the seminal work of Littlewood, Szegő, Pólya, and perhaps even Cauchy, due to his 1829 proof [8] of the fundamental theorem of algebra, which gives explicit bounds on the magnitude of the complex roots (see [7, Theorem 1.2.1] for a modern treatment of this proof). One line of research, initiated by the 1938 -1943 work of Littlewood and Offord [21, 22, 23], concerns the typical distribution of roots of random polynomials. For example Kac [18] gave an exact integral formulafor the number of real roots of random polynomial, with coefficients sampled independently from a normal distribution. Later, Erdős and Offord [11] showed that as n → ∞ almost all polynomials of the form n i=0 ε i x i , where ε 1 , . . . , ε n ∈ {0...