Euler-Frobenius numbers and rounding

Svante Janson1
1DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS, UPPSALA UNIVERSITY, PO BOX 480, SE-751 06 UPPSALA, SWEDEN

Abstract

We study the Euler–Frobenius numbers, a generalization of the Eulerian numbers, and the probability distribution obtained by normalizing them. This distribution can be obtained by rounding a sum of independent uniform random variables; this is more or less implicit in various results and we try to explain this and various connections to other areas of mathematics, such as spline theory.
The mean, variance and (some) higher cumulants of the distribution are calculated. Asymptotic results are given. We include a couple of applications to rounding errors and election methods.