On a balanced property of derangements (Q870021)

Summary: We prove an interesting fact describing the location of the roots of the generating polynomials of the numbers of derangements of length \(n\), counted by their number of cycles. We then use this result to prove that if \(k\) is the number of cycles of a randomly selected derangement of length \(n\), then the probability that \(k\) is congruent to a given \(r\) modulo a given \(q\) converges to \(1/q\). Finally, we generalize our results to \(a\)-derangements, which are permutations in which each cycle is longer than \(a\).