Math Colloquium: Megan Owen

Speaker

Megan Owen, CUNY Graduate Center

Title

The geometric space of phylogenetic trees: Algorithms and Applications

Abstract

A phylogenetic tree represents the evolutionary history of a set of organisms, like marsupials or virus strains. Billera, Holmes, and Vogtmann defined a moduli space of metric trees to provide a natural geometric setting for analyzing phylogenetic tree data. This treespace is CAT, or non-positively curved, allowing algorithms to quickly compute distances and Frechet means. I will discuss both these algorithms and some recent applications of this space to problems in evolutionary biology.

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