We study the densities of uniform random walks in the plane. A special focus is on the case of short walks with three or four steps and less completely those with five steps. As one of the main results, we obtain a hypergeometric representation of the density for four steps, which complements the classical elliptic representation in the case of three steps. It appears unrealistic to expect similar results for more than five steps. New results are also presented concerning the moments of uniform random walks and, in particular, their derivatives. Relations with Mahler measures are discussed.

For a fixed algebraic number $\alpha$ we discuss how closely $\alpha$ can be approximated by a root of a $\{0,+1,-1\}$ polynomial of given degree. We show that the worst rate of approximation tends to occur for roots of unity, particularly those of small degree. For roots of unity these bounds depend on the order of vanishing, $k$, of the polynomial at $\alpha$. In particular we obtain the following. Let ${\cal B}_{N}$ denote the set of roots of all $\{0,+1,-1\}$ polynomials of degree at most $N$ and ${\cal B}_{N}(\alpha,k)$ the roots of those polynomials that have a root of order at most $k$ at $\alpha$. For a Pisot number $\alpha$ in $(1,2]$ we show that \[ \min_{\beta \in {\cal B}_{N}\setminus \{ \alpha \}} |\alpha -\beta| \asymp \frac{1}{\alpha^{N}}, \] and for a root of unity $\alpha$ that \[ \min_{\beta \in {\cal B}_{N}(\alpha,k)\setminus \{\alpha\}} |\alpha -\beta|\asymp \frac{1}{N^{(k+1) \left\lceil \frac{1}{2}\phi (d)\right\rceil +1}}. \] We study in detail the case of $\alpha=1$, where, by far, the best approximations are real. We give fairly precise bounds on the closest real root to 1. When $k=0$ or 1 we can describe the extremal polynomials explicitly.