Date & Time: Wednesday, February 03, 2016, 16:00-17:00.
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Speaker: Bhalchandra Thatte,
Federal University of Minas Gerais,
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Title: The maximum agreement subtree problem
Abstract: I will talk about the following extremal problem on phylogenetic trees. Let T1 and T2 be two phylogenetic trees both on the leaf set {1,2,...,n}. It has been conjectured that there exists a subset X of {1,2,...,n} of cardinality o(log n) such that the restrictions of T1 and T2 on X are isomorphic. We will show a bound of o(sqrt(log n)) improving on the previously known bound of o(log log n). The talk will be elementary in nature, and no background of phylogenetic trees or biology will be necessary. (Joint work with Daniel Martin, Sao Paulo.)