[STAT/AP] Serte Donderwinkel: Random tree encodings and snakes

23 September 2024 15:45 till 16:45 - Location: EEMCS Lecture Hall F | Add to my calendar

"There are several functional encodings of random trees which are commonly used to prove (among other things) scaling limit results. We consider two of these, the height process and Lukasiewicz path, in the classical setting of a branching process tree with critical offspring distribution of finite variance, conditioned to have n vertices. These processes converge jointly in distribution after rescaling by √n to constant multiples of the same standard Brownian excursion, as n goes to infinity. Their difference (taken with the appropriate constants), however, is a nice example of a discrete snake whose displacements are deterministic given the vertex degrees; to quote Marckert, it may be thought of as a “measure of internal complexity of the tree”. We prove that this discrete snake converges on rescaling by n^{-1/4} to the Brownian snake driven by a Brownian excursion. This is a consequence of our new theory for “globally centred” discrete snakes that improves earlier works of Marckert and Janson and enjoys further applications in, for example, random maps.

This is joint work in progress with Louigi Addario-Berry, Christina Goldschmidt and Rivka Mitchell."