The Math/Stats Colloquium brings the fall semester to an exciting conclusion with Ruriko Yoshida (Naval Postgraduate School) on “Evolution and Triangles in Tree Spaces”.  A phylogenetic tree, also known as an evolutionary tree, is a tree representation of evolutionary history among different species.  Since Charles Darwin illustrated the notion of an evolutionary tree, such trees have provided a great statistical model to learn the evolutionary history of biological data.  Motivated by statistical analysis on a set of phylogenetic trees, we are interested in the space of all possible phylogenetic trees with a given number of species.  In this talk we will discuss some properties of triangles in this space.  (Joint with B. Lin, B. Sturmfels, and X. Tang)

Background: One semester linear algebra.  Interest in geometry, statistics, or computational biology is helpful but not necessary.

• Date: Fri Dec 09
• Time: 2:30-3:20pm
• Room: MH320
• Snacks: 2:00pm in MH331B

For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.

Hope to see you there!