Golomb–Dickman constant

In mathematics, the Golomb–Dickman constant arises in the theory of random permutations and in number theory. Its value is

$\lambda =0.62432998854355087099293638310083724\dots .$

Let a_n be the average — taken over all permutations of a set of size n — of the length of the longest cycle in each permutation. Then the Golomb–Dickman constant is

$\lambda =\lim _{n\to \infty }{\frac {a_{n}}{n}}.$

In the language of probability theory, $\lambda n$ is the expected length of the longest cycle in a uniformly distributed random permutation of a set of size n.

In number theory, the Golomb–Dickman constant appears in connection with the average size of the largest prime factor of an integer. More precisely,

$\lambda =\lim _{n\to \infty }{\frac {1}{n}}\sum _{k=2}^{n}{\frac {\log(P_{1}(k))}{\log(k)}},$

where $P_{1}(k)$ is the largest prime factor of k. So if k is a d digit integer, then $\lambda d$ is the asymptotic average number of digits of the largest prime factor of k.

A related result is the one hundred prisoners problem in random permutation statistics: asymptotically, the fraction of permutations with a cycle of length greater than n/2 is $\log 2\approx 0.693$, or about 69%.

See also

• Random permutation
• Random permutation statistics

External links

• Weisstein, Eric W. "Golomb-Dickman Constant". MathWorld.
• Sloane, N. J. A. (ed.). "Sequence A084945". The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. OEIS Foundation.
• Finch, Steven R. (2003). Mathematical Constants. Cambridge University Press. pp. 284–286. ISBN 0521818052.