The statistics of meander and related problems are studied as particular
realizations of compact polymer chain foldings. This paper presents a general
discussion of these topics, with a particular emphasis on three points: (i) the
use of a direct recursive relation for building (semi) meanders (ii) the
equivalence with a random matrix model (iii) the exact solution of simpler
related problems, such as arch configurations or irreducible meanders.Comment: 82 pages, uuencoded, uses harvmac (l mode) and epsf, 26+7 figures
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