Harmonic mean, random polynomials and stochastic matrices. (Q1415390)

Motivated by a problem in the learning theory, the authors study the dominant eigenvalues of a class of stochastic matrices. This turns out to be related to the roots of derivative of random polynomials (generated by picking their roots uniformly at random in the interval \([0, 1]\)). The article gives a few sharp results on the statistical properties of the smallest critical point. This, in turn, requires the study of the statistical behavior of the harmonic mean of identical independently distributed random variables, and the study yields a number of limiting distributions and laws of large numbers.