Branching structures are very common in nature and real world. Historically Galton and Watson were the first giving mathematical statements on the survival of noble family names.

The weighted branching process is basically a branching process, where every individuum carries an additional weight. This weight is the weight of the mother times a random factor. We will present in the talk the basic concepts, stochastic fixed point equations and modern tools for solving them like the contraction method.

There are various applications of these results to mathematics. The greatest success for these tools was probably in the area they were invented for, the analysis of random algorithms. Depending on interest I will present the analysis of Quicksort or a more abstract mathematical example in detail.
 

Convenor:Aidan Sudbury