Eulerian idempotent, pre-Lie logarithm and combinatorics of trees

The aim of this paper is to bring together the three objects in the title. Recall that, given a Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$, the Eulerian idempotent is a canonical projection from the enveloping algebra $U(\mathfrak{g})$ to $\mathfrak{g}$. The Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff product and the Magnus expansion can both be expressed in terms of the Eulerian idempotent, which makes it interesting to establish explicit formulas for the latter. We show how to reduce the computation of the Eulerian idempotent to the computation of a logarithm in a certain pre-Lie algebra of planar, binary, rooted trees. The problem of finding formulas for the pre-Lie logarithm, which is interesting in its own right -- being related to operad theory, numerical analysis and renormalization -- is addressed using techniques inspired by umbral calculus. As a consequence of our analysis, we find formulas both for the Eulerian idempotent and the pre-Lie logarithm in terms of the combinatorics of trees.Comment: Preliminary version. Comments are welcome

Pattern avoidance in labelled trees

We discuss a new notion of pattern avoidance motivated by the operad theory: pattern avoidance in planar labelled trees. It is a generalisation of various types of consecutive pattern avoidance studied before: consecutive patterns in words, permutations, coloured permutations etc. The notion of Wilf equivalence for patterns in permutations admits a straightforward generalisation for (sets of) tree patterns; we describe classes for trees with small numbers of leaves, and give several bijections between trees avoiding pattern sets from the same class. We also explain a few general results for tree pattern avoidance, both for the exact and the asymptotic enumeration.Comment: 27 pages, corrected various misprints, added an appendix explaining the operadic contex

Limit Laws for Functions of Fringe trees for Binary Search Trees and Recursive Trees

We prove limit theorems for sums of functions of subtrees of binary search trees and random recursive trees. In particular, we give simple new proofs of the fact that the number of fringe trees of size $k=k_n$ in the binary search tree and the random recursive tree (of total size $n$) asymptotically has a Poisson distribution if $k\rightarrow\infty$, and that the distribution is asymptotically normal for $k=o(\sqrt{n})$. Furthermore, we prove similar results for the number of subtrees of size $k$ with some required property $P$, for example the number of copies of a certain fixed subtree $T$. Using the Cram\'er-Wold device, we show also that these random numbers for different fixed subtrees converge jointly to a multivariate normal distribution. As an application of the general results, we obtain a normal limit law for the number of $\ell$-protected nodes in a binary search tree or random recursive tree. The proofs use a new version of a representation by Devroye, and Stein's method (for both normal and Poisson approximation) together with certain couplings