Cumulants, lattice paths, and orthogonal polynomials

A formula expressing free cumulants in terms of the Jacobi parameters of the corresponding orthogonal polynomials is derived. It combines Flajolet's theory of continued fractions and Lagrange inversion. For the converse we discuss Gessel-Viennot theory to express Hankel determinants in terms of various cumulants.Comment: 11 pages, AMS LaTeX, uses pstricks; revised according to referee's suggestions, in particular cut down last section and corrected some wrong attribution

Cumulants and convolutions via Abel polynomials

We provide an unifying polynomial expression giving moments in terms of cumulants, and viceversa, holding in the classical, boolean and free setting. This is done by using a symbolic treatment of Abel polynomials. As a by-product, we show that in the free cumulant theory the volume polynomial of Pitman and Stanley plays the role of the complete Bell exponential polynomial in the classical theory. Moreover via generalized Abel polynomials we construct a new class of cumulants, including the classical, boolean and free ones, and the convolutions linearized by them. Finally, via an umbral Fourier transform, we state a explicit connection between boolean and free convolution

Appell polynomials and their relatives II. Boolean theory

The Appell-type polynomial family corresponding to the simplest non-commutative derivative operator turns out to be connected with the Boolean probability theory, the simplest of the three universal non-commutative probability theories (the other two being free and tensor/classical probability). The basic properties of the Boolean Appell polynomials are described. In particular, their generating function turns out to have a resolvent-type form, just like the generating function for the free Sheffer polynomials. It follows that the Meixner (that is, Sheffer plus orthogonal) polynomial classes, in the Boolean and free theory, coincide. This is true even in the multivariate case. A number of applications of this fact are described, to the Belinschi-Nica and Bercovici-Pata maps, conditional freeness, and the Laha-Lukacs type characterization. A number of properties which hold for the Meixner class in the free and classical cases turn out to hold in general in the Boolean theory. Examples include the behavior of the Jacobi coefficients under convolution, the relationship between the Jacobi coefficients and cumulants, and an operator model for cumulants. Along the way, we obtain a multivariate version of the Stieltjes continued fraction expansion for the moment generating function of an arbitrary state with monic orthogonal polynomials