Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Operads and the Tree of Life


As a biologist, much of the mathematical world passes me by. Therefore, whenever I come across anything mathematical on the web, I may or may not understand it.

I freely admit that this blog post, posted last year at a blog called Azimuth, went straight over my head:
Operads and the Tree of Life

The author's conclusion is this:
"And so, phylogenetic trees turn out to be related to coproducts of operads. Who’d have thought it? But we really don’t have as many fundamentally different ideas as you might think: it’s hard to have new ideas. So if you see biologists and algebraic topologists both drawing pictures of trees, you should expect that they’re related."

I mention it here for what it may be worth to any mathematician who reads this post.

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