Mostly Biomathematics Lunchtime Seminar

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Statistics of large trees and RNA secondary structures

Speaker: Yuri Bakhtin, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1314

Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 12:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

I will discuss statistics of combinatorial structures called plane trees and give a Large Deviation Principle for their vertex degree distributions in the limit of infinite tree size. This result can be interpreted as a description of typical RNA secondary structures. In particular, they do not look like the naive energy minimizers due to the presence of the entropy factor, which is an instance of a simple general principle that is often overlooked. The talk is based on a joint paper with Christine Heitsch.