Limit theorems for projections of random walk on a hypersphere

Abstract

We show that almost any one-dimensional projection of a suitably scaled random walk on a hypercube, inscribed in a hypersphere, converges weakly to an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process as the dimension of the sphere tends to infinity. We also observe that the same result holds when the random walk is replaced with spherical Brownian motion. This latter result can be viewed as a “functional” generalisation of Poincaré’s observation for projections of uniform measure on high dimensional spheres; the former result is an analogous generalisation of the Bernoulli–Laplace central limit theorem. Given the relation of these two classic results to the central limit theorem for convex bodies, the modest results provided here would appear to motivate a functional generalisation.