On a Balanced Property of Derangements

Abstract

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 $a$.