Composite Calendar
IAS Visiting Fellow: Professor Andreas Dress
'Trees, splits and nets: reconstructing history in biology, literature and language'
Abstract: I will discuss a general method by which one can infer historical or pre-historical events, even though direct evidence may be lacking. I will present some specific applications to data sets from biology, literature (the "phylogeny" of the Canterbury tales), and language (based on the WALS data base --- the Leipzig World Atlas of Language Structure). Much of the talk will require little or no mathematical background, but I will introduce the (mathematical) structures that enable investigations to be developed in a quantitative way. This development follows from basic mathematical ideas such as tight-span and split-decomposition theory which I will explain.
Both my lectures are based on joint work with Kathi Huber, Jack Koolen, Vincent Moulton, WU Taoyang, and many others.The Complexity Forum is preceded by an informal sandwich lunch, starting around 12.15 in the Complexity Common Room. To assess the sandwich-demand, an email to complexity@warwick.ac.uk would be helpful, if you expect to attend the lunch. After the talk there will be an opportunity to talk to Professor Dress informally over coffee.