Everyone welcome. Refreshments will be served in the Math Lounge before the exam.
The thesis can be viewed at
https://sites.google.com/site/adisgur/thesis
Monday, February 27, 2012
10:10 a.m., in BA 2195, 40 St. George Street
PhD Candidate: Abraham Isgur
PhD Advisor: Steve Tanny
Thesis Title: Solving Nested Recursions With Trees
Thesis Abstract:
This thesis concerns the use of labelled infinite trees to solve families of nested recursions of the form
$$R(n)=\sum_{i=1}^kR(n-a_i-\sum_{j=1}^pR(n-b_{ij}))+\nu ,$$
where $a_i$ is a nonnegative integer, $\nu$ is any integer, and $b_{ij},k,$ and $p$ are natural numbers. We show that the solutions to many families of such nested recursions have an intriguing combinatorial interpretation, namely, they count nodes on the bottom level of labelled infinite trees that correspond to the recursion. Furthermore, we show how the parameters defining these recursion families relate in a natural way to specific structural properties of the corresponding tree families. We introduce a general tree “pruning” methodology that we use to establish all the required tree-sequence correspondences.
no comment as of now