Guillaume Scholz: Distance-hereditary graphs in phylogenetics

Abstract

Graph Theory is a branch of discrete mathematics with applications in various area of science: algorithmics, decision theory, social sciences, chemistry, and many more. In this talk, I will present some of the interactions between graph theory and evolutionary biology.

I will begin with introducing the well-studied class of distance-hereditary graphs, as well as two of its subclasses: cographs and Ptolemaic graphs. I will then give a brief history of evolutionary biology, and present some of the key concepts of this field of study. In the third and last part, I will show how the graph classes presented in the first part relate to the concepts presented in the second part.