Polyhedral Covers of Tree Space

The phylogenetic tree space, introduced by Billera, Holmes, and Vogtmann, is a cone over a simplicial complex. In this short article, we construct this complex from local gluings of classical polytopes, the associahedron and the permutohedron. Its homotopy is also reinterpreted and calculated based on polytope data.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Diagonalizing the genome II: toward possible applications

In a previous paper, we showed that the orientable cover of the moduli space of real genus zero algebraic curves with marked points is a compact aspherical manifold tiled by associahedra, which resolves the singularities of the space of phylogenetic trees. In this draft of a sequel, we construct a related (stacky) resolution of a space of real quadratic forms, and suggest, perhaps without much justification, that systems of oscillators parametrized by such objects may may provide useful models in genomics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure