The distribution of sums and products of additive functions

Abstract

The celebrated Erdős--Kac theorem says, roughly speaking, that the values of additive functions satisfying certain mild hypotheses are normally distributed. In the intervening years, similar normal distribution laws have been shown to hold for certain non-additive functions and for amenable arithmetic functions over certain subsets of the natural numbers. Continuing in this vein, we show that if $g_1(n), \ldots, g_k(n)$ is a collection of functions satisfying certain mild hypotheses for which an Erdős--Kac-type normal distribution law holds, and if $Q(x_1, \ldots, x_k)$ is a polynomial with nonnegative real coefficients, then $Q(g_1(n), \ldots, g_k(n))$ also obeys a normal distribution law. We also show that a similar result can be obtained if the set of inputs $n$ is restricted to certain subsets of the natural numbers, such as shifted primes. Our proof uses the method of moments. We conclude by providing examples of our theorem in action.