The zeros of derivatives of entire functions and the Pólya-Wiman conjecture (Q579462)

In the early 1930's, G. Pólya and A. Wiman independently considered the behavior of the zeros of real entire functions under repeated differentiation. They conjectured that if f(x) is a real entire function of order less than two with only a finite number of nonreal zeros, then the derivatives \(f^{(n)}(x)\) will have only real zeros for all sufficiently large n. The authors prove this conjecture with an elementary but technical argument involving Jensen ellipses and the Jensen-Nagy-Walsh theorem. They estimate the nonreal zeros of \(f^{(n)}(x)\) and thus show that a counterexample to the conjecture would violate a classical result of Ålander on the location of the zeros. A subsequent conjecture of Pólya is that the result also holds for certain entire functions of order two with only a finite number of nonreal zeros. The arguments of this paper are extended to functions of genus one in [the authors, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 101, 323-326 (1987)], partially proving this more general conjecture.