Shortest connectivity. An introduction with applications in phylogeny. (Q1762565)

The aim of this graduate-level text is to summarize mathematical concepts concerned with problems of shortest connectivity, and to demonstrate important applications of the theory, in particular in biology. The theory involves discrete mathematics, graph theory, optimization, computer science, and several ideas in biology. The book contains extensive references and gives rise to many problems for further research. The author starts with two classical optimization problems: (i) the Fermat-Steiner-Weber-problem: given three points in the plane, find a forth point such that the sum of its distances to the three given points is minimal, and (ii) the minimum spanning tree problem: given a weighted connected graph, find a subgraph connecting all vertices which has minimal total cost. After that the author proceeds to a general problem of network design formulated as follows: given a configuration of vertices or edges, find a network which satisfies some predetermined requirements and which minimizes a given objective function. In the second half of the book the theory is applied to the question of reconstruction of phylogenetic trees which reflect the evolutionary history of life. This is done by introducing phylogenetic spaces which are metric spaces consisting of words generated from some alphabet and distances measuring similarity between words. In this context a phylogenetic tree is obtained as a minimal tree in a desired chosen phylogenetic space. Examples are discussed in the history of evolution, taxonomy, historical linguistics and others.