STATISTICS OF PRIME DIVISORS IN FUNCTION FIELDS

Abstract

We show that the prime divisors of a random polynomial in 𝔽q[t] are typically "Poisson distributed". This result is analogous to the result in ℤ of Granville [1]. Along the way, we use a sieve developed by Granville and Soundararajan [2] to give a simple proof of the Erdös–Kac theorem in the function field setting. This approach gives stronger results about the moments of the sequence {ω(f)}f∈𝔽q[t] than was previously known, where ω(f) is the number of prime divisors of f.