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

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The zeros of derivatives of entire functions and the Pólya-Wiman conjecture
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    The zeros of derivatives of entire functions and the Pólya-Wiman conjecture (English)
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    1987
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    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.
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    Pólya-Wiman conjecture
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    Laguerre-Pólya class
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