A deck of n cards is shuffled by repeatedly taking off the top m cards and inserting them in random positions. We give a closed form expression for the distribution after any number of steps. This is used to give the asymptotics of the approach to stationarity: for m fixed and n large, it takes shuffles to get close to random. The formulae lead to new subalgebras in the group algebra of the symmetric group.
Using Fourier analysis, we prove that the limiting distribution of the standardized random number of comparisons used by Quicksort to sort an array of n numbers has an everywhere positive and infinitely differentiable density f , and that each derivative f (k) enjoys superpolynomial decay at ±∞. In particular, each f (k) is bounded. Our method is sufficiently computational to prove, for example, that f is bounded by 16.
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