Festoon Trees

Meeting Time: Sept. 22, 2009, 2:00-2:50pm

Abstract: Among trees on n vertices and some bounded degree, there is a unique tree maximizing the number of independent sets, minimizing the number of matchings, and minimizing the energy. All three of these extremal trees happen to be the same. We will discuss the interesting structure of this class of trees, and an interesting system of numeration that arises from these trees.