Asymptotic independence of maximum waiting times for increasing alphabet

For everyk≥1 consider the waiting time until each pattern of lengthk over a fixed alphabet of sizen appears at least once in an infinite sequence of independent, uniformly distributed random letters. Lettingn→∞ we determine the limiting finite dimensional joint distributions of these waiting times after suitable normalization and provide an estimate for the rate of convergence. It will turn out that these waiting times are getting independent. Research supported by the Hungarian National Foundation for Scientific Research, Grant No. 1905.