An Exposition on Wigner's Semicircular Law

Abstract: We revisit the moment method to obtain a slightly strengthened version of the usual semicircular law. Our version assumes only that the upper triangular entries of Hermitian random matrices are independent, have mean zero and variances close to $1/n$ in a certain sense, and satisfy a Lindeberg-type condition. As an application, we derive another semicircular law for the case when the sum of a row converges in distribution to the standard normal distribution, including the case where all matrix entries may have infinite variance. The appendix, making up the majority of the paper, provides for those new to the subject, a rigorous exposition of most details involved, including also a proof of a semicircular law that uses the Stieltjes transform method.